Offer of Channel Partner to host a microsite - should I be doing this.

[Gavsta]

Hi All.

I work for a regional IT services business and we supply various IT solutions. One of our channel distributors is running a campaign with a large global vendor (you will know them) where they have built a solution microsite at https://vendorname-solution.com for themselves and then created a copy of this site for ten end partners, including my business.

They have done this by what looks like copying the entire site and creating a copy of the site at a subdomain for each of the ten partners at http://partner1/2/3 etc.vendorname-solution.com.

So if we go ahead and agree to this approach I am potentially worried about the following and whether I should built out our own version instead.

1 - there is no https being offered so we will get penalised by Google ?
2 - we can't add any tracking to the subsite as it isn't under our control
3 - will Google see all these subdomain copies as duplicate content and penalise me (and the others)
4 - I am worried that anyone removing the subdomain from the URL will then land on the distributors microsite and not ours and the only way of trying to prevent this is to embed in an iframe but that doesn't sound a good idea to me.

I don't get the feeling that the channel partner knows much about SEO so could do with some help trying to assess whether I should be concerned and politely politely turn down their offer to run this microsite for us ?

Thanks in advance for your comments

[Gavsta]

Hi Nigel

Thanks for your advice and confirming my concerns.

Regards

Gavin

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Gavsta

What they are offering is essentially a copy of your website on a micro-site within their own framework.

If you are happy with them doing this because you feel it will help generate more business for you then, by all means, go ahead. They must, however, Noindex the entire micro-site so that it does not appear in Google. If they allow it to rank then it will completely destroy all of your SEO efforts and your rankings will plummet. Google does not handle duplicate content well - it would simply not know which version to rank so would end up raking neither.

I suffered a huge penguin penalty in 2012 for trying to rank micro-sites which pre 2012 worked very well - don't fall into that trap. If they say no then you can't allow them to set it up at all.

Regards

Nigel