Basic Multi-Site Question

[SSBCI]

Newb question.  We run a site in multiple cities under the same domain.  Often times one city will provide content that is "syndicated" to other cites.

For example, here is the master post:

• http://www.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/kale-salad-quick-healthy/

The content will also show up in the following domains:

• http://atlanta.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/kale-salad-quick-healthy/
• http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/

Should I be marketing the posts in Atlanta and Birmingham as "no index, no follow" for SEO purposes?

Thanks in advance, Jay

[Mark_Ginsberg]

What you described here is the same content on multiple subdomains. If you add no index, no follow, you'll prevent the other pages from being indexed and from passing link equity. Firstly, even if you would go this route, I wound't add the no follow rule - that just means you're losing any juice that passes to the page from links, not something you necessarily want to do.

In this case, I'd recommend changing your canonical tag - the birmingham subdomain uses the canonical tag on itself, claiming that it should be credited with the content, when in truth, you said you want the credit flowing to the www version of the site. So you need to change your canonical tag on the location based subdomains to point to the www subdomain. So for http://birmingham.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/, the canonical should be  rel="canonical" href="http://www.styleblueprint.com/food-and-entertaining/recipes/kale-salad-quick-healthy/" />

Hope this helps