White branded website & SEO

[Kuantokusta]

Hi guys,

We might have as a new project to create a white branded website for a big portal in our local market (which have a strongest domain than ours): the goal will be to reach their big mass of users and if possible, place this new site BEHIND us on the SERPs.

Since the content of the new website will basically be the same, we are considering 2 solutions:

• to "noindex" the site on search engines, which is a "secure" way to not create ourself a competitor

• to allow the site to be indexed on search engines but using the "rel=canonical" strategy to not be affected by duplicate content penalties

(For example, we plan to add rel='canonical' href='http://www.ourdomain.com/category1/product2' /> on their page http://newsubdomain.theirdomain.com/category1/product2)

The main question is: can the white branded website rank better than our site even with the "canonical" strategy?

(Of course we could "lower" the quality of the white-branded website pages to avoid that risk... but if somebody has better advices, we would be glad to hear them )

[Kuantokusta]

This would mean that we have to lower the quality of the white-branded website pages (putting less filters, contents) or simply "nofollow" it..

Thanks Matt for your opinion!

(For the ones interested in the topic, there is also an interesting blog post + comments here: http://moz.com/ugc/using-whitelabel-sites-for-seo)

[MattJanaway]

I think I am in a good position to answer this as in February I completed a project which created clones or White Label exact copies of one of the websites I work on. The content, the pages, the URL's and everything was the same. We did give them all slight design changes though. The site has around 30 duplications now around the web. The reason for these White Label websites is due to having "salesmen" of our branded products who are self employed and needed a website to point their own clients and customers to in the hope that it shows off the range.

Now we developed 30 of these and the first couple I started using canonical tags on every single page except the homepage. Even though largely successful, there were still some pages indexed above the main website in SERP's - luckily for no major keywords. It shows that canonical does not work in every single case perfectly.

Since then, we have noindexed and nofollowed every single link on each site and none of them are indexed nor ranked in search results now. In addition to this, we also set up canonical tags to be safe.

Hopefully that helps!