Thread

Hello all

I am contemplating a new project to create a portal.

The idea is to have a master domain e.g. http://www.master.co.uk pointing to the root of the site.

The portal will be split by location so I will have in effect a replicated home page for each location and unique pages also for each location.  The structure using templates will be http://www.master.co.uk/london, www.master.co.uk/edinburgh, etc etc.

I will then point domains such as http://www.masterlondon.co.uk to www.master.co.uk/london etc

The questions I have are:

1.  Will this work and is it best practice?
2.  Will it have an impact on SEO?
3.  What is a suitable alternative?
4.  If it is ok, what is the best way to do the redirect, e.g. Server config, htaccess (if possible?) etc

And a cheeky one:
5.  If possible I would also appreciate a very quick overview of how more experienced EE users than me would do this, I am obviously trying to avoid paying for a license for each location if possible, I also do not feel this would be a good way of doing things due to the large duplication of code that would be required.

I want to make sure I get this project right from the outset to avoid masses of work correcting in the future.

Your help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Chris

Hi Chris,

This sounds like a really interesting project! While consultation on site pre-production isn’t something we offer, I’m sure there are loads of users in the community who have tackled various parts of your questions in their own work. Would you like me to move this thread over to Community Help so that you can get some attention there?

Hey Kevin

That would be great, thanks

Kind regards

Chris

I’ve moved the thread for you, Chris. Best of luck!

1.  Will this work and is it best practice?

Yes, this will work. It is a fairly common practice.

In fact, you could even do some location-based automatic redirects if you wanted to (like how when I go to craigslist.com, I am automatically redirected to houston.craigstlist.com.)

2.  Will it have an impact on SEO?

You don’t want to have the the same content appear at multiple addresses on the same domain. In fact, you really don’t want to have duplicate content appear anywhere—Your best SEO comes from having a single authoritative place for each piece of content (though, perhaps, with multiple canonical in-paths).

4.  If it is ok, what is the best way to do the redirect, e.g. Server config, htaccess (if possible?) etc

If you want the site to appear under the individual domains, using only one site in EE, you could do it with a clever combination of relative site paths, config.php variables, and template groups.

If the numer of ‘destinations’ is fairly small, it might also be worthwhile to set them each up as a separate MSM site—you can run up to three sites (I think) on a single EE license/installation.

Probably a better solution would be to have the more specific domains (i.e. masterlondon.co.uk) just do a permanent redirect to the primary site (i.e. master.co.uk/london).