Research on White Label and SEO

[Andy1969]

Hi

We are an ecommerce site wanting to co-brand with other companies who want to sell our product using there name (they take % of sales).

We are however aware of the issues facing duplicate content and site replication and want to know how we can avoid this when we launch the new sites. We are not trying to 'trick' the search engines in any way by having multiple sites but these sites will officially be someone elses site just containing our content, however each site will have a very similar look and feel.

The sites will also require therir own SEO work so that site 'x' can be indexed as well as site 'y' and 'z'. Obvioulsy our clients realise the importance of SEM and will want to see their sites indexed and listed.

To avoid site replication we first considered just using the robots.txt file to exclude sites from being indexed, but with what I mentioned above about clients and SEM we therefore cannot exclude spiders.

So we are currently looking for any research papers that may be available to us to help us do our SEO homework correctly and above board (white hat SEO).

All 'free' help greatfully recieved but I do have my cheque book ready too.

Many Thanks

Andy

[telNform]

Make sure you use the Robots Exclusion File (robots.txt) to disallow the spiders from crawling the site and you will be fine ... again these site(s) will get no Organic Search Traffic, but your site will.

It is a very simple fix.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

There is really only two ways: A) Either make sure the content on each site is different enough not to be duplicate or B) Robots.txt block all sites but one

[Michael Martinez]

Considering that other co-branders don't worry about duplicate content and don't seem to have any problems, I don't think you need be concerned.

Your best bet is to stress uniqueness of design among your partners.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

A lot of such duplicate co-branded sites have indeed suffered from this in the past. Also, it's not so much the uniqueness of the design that makes the difference but the uniqueness of words :)

[Michael Martinez]

I agree that I should have said "uniqueness of words", but duplicate content abounds throughout all the search engines. People shoot themselves in the foot for many reasons.

I am not encouraging duplicate content, but I AM encouraging the vendor to make it easy for the co-branding partners to differentiate their sites.

Perhaps I should have put it that way.

[Andy1969]

I've found several large web sites that have duplicate content and are very well indexed by Google. How can this be and why are they not banned for having duplicate content, one is a service offered by MSN!!

PM if you want the urls as I dont think I can post urls in forum threads.

[Mikkel deMib Svendsen]

You don't usually get banned from duplicate content - they just skip one version or more but they do not ban you.

Also, you should remember that just because they do not want duplicate content they may not allways find it right away. Look again in a month or a year and it might be gone.