If i had a copy of my website in a subdomain, will that hurt my SEO?

[matteo_hughes]

I was considering the idea of selling franchise type versions of my main site. They would be the same as my main site, but for the franchise owner it would be placed in their own unique sub domain. So would having duplicate copies of my main site hurt my SEO with Google, yahoo and msn?

[BizSharing]

Yes. When google found this they will stop crawling your site. Maybe they thought it is better to spend their time elsewhere. What is the point of going into some room when you have seen it already in another room. Don't you think you will feel bad if it happens to you.

[Micheal]

It will definitely affect because when google find duplicate content or stuff it might stop crawling your website.

[Ann]

A subdomain is as unique as another domain for crawlers. Both sites would be crawled and indexed, though the duplicate pages would not rank well on the keywords, as much as the main site should, given that you are taking care of ALL factors: on-site, on-page and off-page for your main site.

If you are really keen on having a subdomain, consider using it for content that is complementary to your main website. For example, the main domain could be your corporate website, but you could have a subdomain for each of your products / specialties. This would especially help if the main domain was a proper noun (without a dictionary definition), but the products/services added as subdomain would give that much keyword impact to your ranking strategy.

[088]

Yes and no...but mostly yes.

Google is rather evolved say in the case of a wordpress blog. It generally knows that you may have some potential on-site duplicate issues...and won't take away your birthday for it.

That being said you definitely want to ensure you focus on having that text in one spot...esp if you're consciously publishing it in both spots.

If you are using one location as kind of a draft or private copy for a group of your coaching students, or whatever....consider making sure you exclude that location in your robots.txt and also if you have it linked ANYWHERE on your site apply the rel="nofollow" tag to the <a href="http://yourotherlocation.to-article.com" rel="nofollow">yada yada</a>

Hope that makes sense.