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As I write blogs for my company I am often in the position of having to come up with ideas on subjects which I don't have a huge interest in. I found it helped to come up with a list of types of post to use, then go further and work out paragraph by paragraph what should be in each type of blog. One of the blogs I manage is about wood burning stoves, so some of the types of post I do are:

• Woodburners which have been featured in the interiors magazines
• Comments on news stories relevant to the stove industry
• Posts built around questions I was asked repeatedly by customers before I moved from sales to SEO
• Buyers guides

Taking it a step further, I can break each of these down paragraph by paragraph so I have a template to follow. For example if I write about a stove I saw in a magazine I follow this format

• Introduction - includes magazine name, issue and page number for the article with the stove; a little bit about the homeowners; either identifies the exact model featured or says I will be talking about similar stoves to the one featured
• Main body - I give my opinion on the way the stove was used in that setting and/or talk about relevant practical issues
• Conclusion - further resources or suggestions for readers thinking about doing something similar

In your position I would look at the other office interior blogs as an ongoing discussion and work out what you can bring to the party. What knowledge or experience do you have which could be of value to a reader? How can you present your views so they get people's attention and invite participation?

There's a big difference between publishing your own picture of a great interior and re-using someone else's without consent , but there are some open source image sites out there which just require credit when you use their pictures. If it's practical you could contact designers and companies with great interiors asking about writing about them or if you can visit to take your own pictures. Once your blog has been going for a while you could even approach other blogs about doing some guest writing for them.

You might find it helpful to use social media when you move the content. Apparently Google can't reliably identify content origins and takes into account social signals and links - some time spent on social bookmarking and posting links to site b on Twitter, Facebook, etc could help shift Google's attention to where you want it to go.

I would be concerned if the home page didn't appear, but I'm not sure whether it matters that it is getting outranked by blog pages. We have eCommerce sites and added blogs to a couple of them around February. Most of the time the blogs seem to support the rankings of the pages they are written to funnel traffic towards, but sometimes they will outrank them. Google seems to love the fresh content, but when blogs outrank other more relevant pages I find there is usually an issue with on-page optimisation.

I'm fairly new to the SEO industry so I can't give you an authoritative answer, but I can share some of my experience which seems relevant to your situation.

We have multiple retail websites with varying degrees of overlap of products on sale. One of our oldest domains specialises in fireplaces, but a couple of years ago we set up a general home products site which has a fireplace section featuring the same products as the specialist fireplace site. We wrote unique descriptions for all the fireplaces on new site.

When the time came to re-build the specialist fireplace site we ended up using the same Magento back-end as for our more general site. For the last 18 months both sites have been showing the same content for fireplaces, but with some differences in the content hierarchy. Currently the general site has a slightly higher domain authority and more external links, while the fireplaces site has links from a slightly higher number of domains.

The fireplace site took a nosedive in rankings for a couple of weeks after the re-launch, then not only recovered but gradually achieved higher rankings than before. The general home product site has never ranked as successfully for fireplace keywords, even though it was the originator of the content.

The difference in domain age may have a little to do with the difference in rankings, but other factors are pretty equal. From our experience it seems that where two related sites are sharing content Google prefers to show content from the site most relevant to the search rather than the site which originated the content.