Is this blackhat?
- SEO |
Situation:
I launched a new site for a client. Let's say example.com. Now, the client wants to run TV ads to promote the site, but instead of promoting example.com, he wants to use other url's like exampledallas.com and examplekansas.com. He wants me to re-create just the home page for each of these and the rest of the menu items will be hyperlinked to go to example.com. So, if a user clicks on any menu item, they are taken to example.com and get to see the rest of the site there.
Now, exampledallas.com etc will have the same design and menu structure, but the content will be slightly different. Since we are re-creating the page over and over and can potentially create 50-60 such sites in the next few months, I was concerned that we are doing something blackhat. Am I right?
One solution that I have recommended is that we put a robot.txt file on each of these, blocking search engine spiders from indexing these sites and I will make each link NOFOLLOW links. That way, we won't get any SEO/backlink benefits.
Note: The reason for creating these sites is that the main site will have generic content and each of the other sites will have city specific content. He also wants to track how well the TV ads are doing for each independent TV campaign in each city. We recommended a redirect but the client doesn't want to do that.
My question to you is, will we get into trouble for using this approach? Would a robot.txt file and nofollow links suffice to keep the search engines happy and not penalize us? I would appreciate your insight.
Thanks again.
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