Almost 2 Identical Sites Mirrored

I’m not sure that will work for you.

I’m gonna call your sites publicexample.com and googleexample.com

You’d have to block google from seeing publicexample.com in order to prevent it from causing a drop in your SEO. However if you do THAT, then all the links users will get are to the googleexample.com site, and I suspect you don’t want that.

Why do they need two sites? The reason you gave didn’t make any sense to me.

Yeah I think there was a misunderstanding. Let me give more detail.

We have our public site (public.com)
And we have our site for Adwords (adwords.com)

I’ve used htaccess to make sure adwords.com doesn’t get indexed
The reason we are doing this is bc we are a weight loss program that uses a drug (even though we don’t sell it online) that you can’t advertise on adwords.

What I need to do is simply have adwords.com mirror whatever changes I make to public.com hopefully with little or no intervention. The only difference really between the two sites is one FAQ page is removed and some references to said drug on other pages.

That … Okay, that just doesn’t make ANY sense in a logical way, and really sounds like you’re doing your best to game the system to be able to have google ads without being penalized for having content Google doesn’t like.

Mike- What I’m doing is per my Google Reps advise…. I’m also Google Adwords certified as well as being in internet marketing for roughly 10 years. I understand this is an unusual circumstance, but without getting into specifics, by no means am I “gaming” the system.

I understand your concern for wanting a better internet, but I’m looking for an answer to my question. Again I understand it’s unusual and if you don’t know what the best workflow/method might be that’s fine, but the dialog thus far has been not been useful.

I get the feeling you think I’m being cheeky. I’m honestly just boggled as to why anyone would want to do it this way. Seriously, I’m confused, so I’m trying to understand the why, so I can actually give you a better answer than “Don’t.” which is what my gut tells me after all this time I’ve been doing this.

You certainly can mirror content (or ‘push’ it) between sites using a broadcasting plugin. That you could have found in about 10 minutes on a Google Search.

HOWEVER. I think that it’s the wrong way to do it. You really run a duplicate penalty risk. Instead, why not just ask Google not to index the pages you don’t want them to see? If you were serious when you said “The other website is 90% the same website minus 2 pages…” then I would just do that.

The following plugin is written by one of the very few people I see as true SEO experts (most people who claim that title are full of it): https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/wordpress-seo/

That plugin has a meta-box added to your content which lets you tag pages and posts to NOT be indexed. Seems a hell of a lot more elegant to me.

The other obvious option is not to have the sites be the same. Have a parent site with the shared content, and a separate site with just the different. That’s easier to manage too.

(PS, it’s an A, not an E)

I think I see what you are trying to achieve here. You threw me a little when you said one site was public and one wasn’t. The fact is you can’t send PPC visitors to the site with mention of that drug as it’s against Googles terms.

So you need one website without the drug content to satisfy Google so that you can pay them loads of money for traffic. Then you still need a website the contains the drug content. It’s ludicrous to think you’d have to manage two websites with the same content apart from maybe a couple of pages and a call to action somewhere.

You can have two separate sites and sync the content either through plugins or writing your own logic, I’ve done it on a few occasions but it just doesn’t give me a good feeling if you know what I mean.

What I would do is have a single website but set it up so that it is accessible on two urls. You can do this using multisite domain mapping and map two domains to a single site and I’m sure with some additional settings in wp-config.php you could achieve this with a normal WordPress install (not multisite).

Then create a very basic plugin that removes the drug pages from the menu when the site is accessed using host=googlenodrugs.com.

You could also create another simple plugin to remove content based on a shortcode so that you could hide blocks of content/calls to action like [drugcontent] get your diet pills now [/drugcontent] and then based on the host name the website is requested on, you could either display that content or hide it.

Then for the googlenodrugs.com host name you can either implement a .htaccess rewrite to the correct robots-noindex.txt (transparently) that tells Google not to index or you can output the correct robots tag in the meta of every page when the host is googlenodrugs.com. Personally I’d go for the .htaccess redirect of the robots.txt content.

Is that what you were after?

That was perfect. Thank you very much. I know its awkward but Google PPC is a hard thing to turn down bc of the their market share.

Thank you for your help.