At our brokerage we have tossed around the idea of 1) setting up our company blog to push live in the near future 2) applying those same articles to the newly built agent subdomains.
My question - is there any harm to taking the same content from the parent site blog and manually uploading individually to the agent websites as well? I know it’s a tedious thing, but we were thinking it might be a nice value-add for the agents as just one more layer of content on their individual websites.
I was told by a friend to be sure the “canonical rel tag” is set to the original blog, otherwise the content could be interpreted as duplicate and we would be penalized from an SEO standpoint.
Is there a way to set up this canonical rel tag to avoid the above scenario?
In general (if you care at all about SEO) this is an absolutely terrible idea.
Canonical “can” be setup (yes), but since it’s all duplicate content anyways (and Google will never value it) you could take it 2 steps further and have the blogs (on subdomains) blocked by robots.txt as well as implement a no index no follow on the directory pages as well.
You could do it as a custom project if you really wanted to do this.
Why not just link to the company blog? If it’s great content users should be reading, link from subdomains to the main site. The user is already cooked to the agent if they landed on the subdomain, so they will still get the lead no matter where they go on the site afterward.
@Morgan What would you suggest to a somewhat similar issue we have with blogs, SEO, and agent wants and needs? Our blogs are cross posted. Agent X creates a blog post on their subdomain and it’s cross posted up to our company level blog. I haven’t been able to come up with a solution that balances these factors:
Important to our agents:
Agents highly value their subdomain where they have control and attention exclusive to them.
They want content, but many don’t want to put in the effort. (Grrrr!)
Agent X doesn’t want Agent Y’s blog posted on their subdomain. (Especially when Agent Y has links to Agent Y’s subdomain)
Agents want all links within their subdomain. They hate when something links out of their subdomain up to our company site.
Imporant to us at company level:
We want our blog and website to be more effective SEO-wise
We recognize duplication isn’t great SEO
We want to keep agents happy
We encourage agents to increase traffic to their site. i.e. Blog, share on socials, link back to their subdomains. Not only is it good for SEO, but blogging also demonstrates authority on real estate to their sphere of influence.
Curious on your thoughts. I’ve been stumped for a while on this issue.