Is there a service that scrapes contact information from websites?

best practices of linking websites and sharing identical content

• I need advice and answers on the best practices of linking websites and sharing identical content/information pages. Circumstances: I have about 140 clients that each want about 25 pages (set) of specific product/service information posted on their site. The information is identical for each site, and doesn?t change often. Each client wants their unique page design and I was considering that they would host the page set in a sub-folder on their website with a link to a contact page hosted on my site. A very smart fellow suggested that the duplicate content pages all linking back to my site may cause a Google penalty for my site and possible my clients. In view of this I am requesting your help. I have been reading about different ways to setup and design links i.e. Option 1: having each set of pages in a folder on my site, w/ or wo/ an index.htm page in the folder. Producing a URL as www.mainsite.com/sub-site#1/index.htm (home). In respect that the pages are copies of the client?s site each page will have their navigation links back. Option 2: place the sub-site folder on their site and only link to a unique contact page on my site. Some considerations: 1) Is having 12 or more links from the sub-site pages to the client be harmful or helpful to ether? 2) Repeating the above scenario 140 times sounds risky ( spam penalty) without using Robots.txt, and I am not sure Robots.txt will prevent problems. 3) Currently there is a link to my site in the body of each page (copyright). 4) Each client already has an advertisement page on my site with links to their front page There are obviously other designs and I don?t understand them for example A ?SUBSITE? that uses a URL like SUBSITE.MAINSITE.COM. I need advice, best practices and details of the options in link design, Thanks, Phil

• Answer:

  I believe that I understand your dilemma now. If this answer is in any way inaccurate, please feel free to ask for answer clarification and I'll try to refine it to your situation. I did a bit of research on what others have discovered with respect to duplicated content and search engines rankings. A Google search for "duplicatied content penalty google" resulted in a number of links, mostly on forums discussing the issue. On the page at http://forums.seochat.com/showthread.php?t=8510, a member discusses the fact that only one copy of the duplicated content will usually be returned as a result. The other forum postings returned by the search seem to indicate that this is the case. Since search engines usually - now bear in mind this is a very broad statement, since engines each use different secret algorithms and even these change all the time - rank pages higher by the number of unique incoming links, you'll find that even with 100+ of your duplicate sites pointing back to your original site, there will likely only be a small increase in your page rank. From what I can tell, you certainly won't be harming the search engine rank of any pages not related to the duplicated content. It is possible you might get a small bump in rank indirectly, as 140 clients point to your content, which then points to your main site. 140 unique incoming links pointing at your content site will probably give your content site a fair boost. Knowing this, I would highly suggest hosting the pages on your own site and not worrying about adding a robots.txt exclusion for the duplicated content. Since it appears to be safe for all other pages, duplication shouldn't be a problem. Keeping them all under the same domain name (as you have now, with www.domain.com/client/page.htm) is the best way to go about it. As for tool suggestions, I highly recommend looking into Fog Creek CityDesk: http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/. CityDesk is an excellent tool for page templating and publishing. You can create one copy of each of your pages to template in the program and then use it to publish the pages to a number of subdirectories using a different template for each one. There is a free starter edition that will allow you to publish up to 50 pages here: http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/Starter.html Once you've used DreamWeaver to create a template for one of your clients, you would import it into CityDesk as a "template set". You would then point it at your site's FTP server and it would automatically create the correct subdirectories for you. Each of the pages would be published into the correct subdirectory, corresponding to the template they are using. I've used the program extensively in the past and it is an excellent tool for easily duplicating identical content a number of times using a different look and feel. In conclusion, I recommend staying with the "one subdirectory per client" approach on the same domain. This will by far be the easiest for you to manage if you ever need to update the pages. CityDesk is also most compatible with this setup and should make maintaining this setup a breeze. Please let me know if I've answered the question to your satisfaction. Don't hesitate to ask me to expand on any of the info I've given here. Good luck and regards, mmastrac-ga