Cloning-Migrating a WordPress Site & Possible SEO Impacts!?
- SEO |
My Purpose: To build a website once then use this template site to deploy/copy across to many new domains thereby saving much time in configuring new sites/plugins etc...
My noob understanding is that "creating a copy of an original site which would then be modified for a particular use, is a common usage scenario for developers who create a "generic" site for, e.g., Dentists or Vets or whatever type of business"!?
My Scenario: Firstly my expertise level is a little above beginner. I purchased a premium wordpress theme and had a wordpress expert customize the look and feel, HTML sitemap page, sidebar and contact page forms. I added a few pages e.g. About Us, Who We are etc that are populated with lorem ipsum data, and this again was done so I could see how they look not too mention the footer widgets rely on these pages existing. I only want to clone the pre-fabricated design/look and feel/functionality etc...not the actual content/copy!
My Process:
1- cloned/migrated everything on the source site, using backup-buddy, to a blank new different domain name, where i had set-up a new database in advance.
2- edited or swapped out the exisitng pages lorem ipsum copy with real copy i had written
3- changed the images/logo/favicon etc etc
4- changed the WP user id/password.display name
BUT...
My Questions:
Everything I have read supports the notion that cloning/copy a themes design/configuration etc doesn't affect SEO...so long as the new sites content is quality/unique/original ...however i think my approach of including pages of lorem ipsum copy then editing this copy on the destination site with the real stuff, might be impacting my early-days SEO results, which are currently poor. (and yes i know there are many other ingredients to make the SEO pie)
I think 'my process' conflicts with the more common approach of cloning/migrating just the theme and plugins...which now leads to my question.
I noticed on my first migrated site that after I had edited the pages, the pages published-on dates had not changed since the source site...will these dates be looked at by Google with a suspicious eye???
I ask this, because if I use Webmaster tools to verify the site, and submit an xml sitemap today(and I have) of the above cloned site yet this newly created site has pages with 'published-on' dates from 3 months ago...then maybe this raises a red-flag for them...any ideas around this greatly appreciated???
cheers
Rick
Who told me this? An ex Google web spam engineer.
What's your excuse?