So I was watching the Google Hangout with John Mueller on Google+ and someone asked a question that almost made me spit out my drink. This woman basically said her company will host "child sites" for their clients, where the content they post on these sites are the same across all their clients.
It reminds me of industry specific platforms, where you'd have a plastic surgery web site builder host the site, content, images, etc for their 100+ clients or so. But all the content would be the same across all the sites, with the ability for them to change their address, phone numbers and maybe some colors.
She asked if the links in the content work well. John Mueller seemed a bit taken back by the question and then said, the link, like the content, would be "diluted" across all the sites hosting the same links and content.
Here is the question or part of it:
So we are sort of hosting a child site on their behalf. It's got all the content in it but that content is actually duplicated because we're providing the same content to a number of clients.
Here is John Mueller's response:
Yeah I don't see that actually providing a lot of value in terms of that link being valuable there. Because you're kind of diluting that the value of that content across all of these multiple sites and you that like any anything that happens with those links is kind of diluted across sites. I don't really see that that kind of link driving any value to the site itself.
Here is the video embed at the start time:
See how nice John was being with his response?
Forum discussion at Google+.
