Legit Domain Masking
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I am working with a real estate client. They have one main site (ie. company.com) that contains all the info, then they have several name domains (ie. salesrepresentative.com) that are forwarding to the main site, but use domain masking to appear as if there is a separate site for each representative. My question is how can I make this legit in Google's eyes, or is this totally not advised?
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You can have a page canonical to itself, so if you just add the canonical tags to all the pages, they'll appear on all of masked domains as well.
Thomas is right; if your goal is to get any of the vanity domains on search result pages, the canonical tags will prevent that. A better set up might be to have the home pages be different (with the reps name and information), and then have the rest of the pages on the site be duplicate content with canonical tags. To say the sites do not exist isn't really accurate... it just means you haven't set them up yet.
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Thanks for the responses. Just to clarify, this isn't being done for SEO purposes. They want it this way so that each representative can have branded access to the site, and so that the content can be changed easily from one location (take for instance the listings, they change often).
As for the rel-canonical, it would be difficult to implement, because the sites do not exist. It is being redirected at the domain level.
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I don't see any real SEO value out of doing domain masking. I do see SEM value but I think you'd be better off re-creating some of the content for your vanity domains. That way you can rank both of them. Otherwise, using a rel=canonical will only get the main domain ranked.
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That's fine, just rel=canonical all the pages under each salesrepresentative.com to the corresponding company.com pages. That tells Google that it's duplicate content, and will consolidate all the rankings for those pages under the company.com domain.
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