4 Websites sharing the same blog content

The “best” way to do this is have all of the sites linking to the same blog pages on a single domain.

Don’t share the blog pages… it will hurt your sites. You might possibly be able to get around this by setting a canonical URL on every blog article to point it back to one main blog, but that might not work as it should, and it will definately mean that at best three of the blogs will have no rankings whatsoever and will not help your sites.

Can I ask why you don’t want to have different blog content on each site? You said that each site has it’s own content, so I’m going to assume that they aren’t all 100% the same subject matter???

Hi!
The 4 people are 4 different lawyers with different focus of work which share an office. They each want their website to have a different branding but want the blog to have the same content – so if one doesn’t write a month or two it still seems busy.

I am starting to wonder if I should just convince them not to share a blog …

That’s easy. Tell them that if they share a blog like that, the best possible outcome is that 3 out of 4 of them will be penalised for it and there’s no way to know which ones it will be, but it could very easily be all four that get hit. When faced with a 75% or greater chance of their site being downgraded in search rankings becaue of this, they should get the message pretty quickly. If they want the blog to help them with their SEO, they’ll have to do the work for it. There’s no other way to do it.

However…

If they are all sharing the same domain name, then it would work. You could break it down to different areas like

domain.com/laywer1
domain.com/lawyer2
domain.com/lawyer3
domain.com/lawyer4
domain.com/blog

That would be OK because they are all under the same domain. It’s when they have have their own separate domains that the troubles occur.

Thank you very much catacaustic! I will do as you suggested. You were a great help and I am pleased to have met you!

Would sharing the same blog on 2 sites still have a bad effect on SEO?

I’ve been looking for a couple of hours on the forum and there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward way of sharing a blog on two separate sites?

Franz92 did you go with Catacaustic’s solution or did you find a way?

Would sharing the same blog on 2 sites still have a bad effect on SEO?

Yes.

Duplicate content is still duplicate content no matter if it’s on 2 or 200 different sites.

markarma, everyone got a different domain and they all have different blog content.