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Would there be any negative SEO effects for having a wordpress website at example.com and having another website at example.com/anothersite?

  1. Would the site "anothersite" be indexed in search engines (assuming I did all the seo strategies for them)?

  2. Any negative effects for either site?

Thanks in advance

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  • FYI, I edited your title and question to be more clear - what you're asking doesn't have anything to do with where the databases for your sites are. Sep 17, 2010 at 17:12

3 Answers 3

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  1. Yes
  2. Whatever negative means to you. I tend to say not more then with a single site.

The search engine will basically spoken not differ between one or more sites. The spider is just indexing pages not sites. So this can have positive effects while the content of one site pulls / pushes the URLs of contents of the other one.

So the arrangement of the sites in URLs on that domain (URL Layout) and it's contents will have the SE influence, not the number of sites you run on the domain.

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  1. Yes.
  2. It depends.

From search engines point of view it would be one site. If content between two installations is grossly different that likely won't be efficient for combined site outlook.

I'd prefer site1.example.com and site2.example.com if hosting two different sites on same domain.

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  • 1
    Thank you very much for you answers, just what I was hoping to hear
    – Jeff
    Sep 17, 2010 at 22:16
  • Just to add to Rarst's comments ... most search engines will index sub-folders as part of the same site. That's why systems installing multiple sites to one domain (i.e. WordPress.com, Blogger) use subdomains rather than sub-folders. Google doesn't see any difference between site.com/pageonsite and site.com/anothersite.
    – EAMann
    Sep 18, 2010 at 15:34
  • SO how would the sitemaps have to work if there are different site maps for each installation if chosen the route of domain/WPsite1 and domain/WPsite2?
    – samjco-com
    Dec 2, 2021 at 19:31
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What would be your reason for doing so?

Short answer - no it shouldn't have an adverse effect on SEO because it will be seen as a single site by a search engine. However there are several reasons why you wouldn't want to do this including

  1. SEO Reason - You won't be able to easily generate cross site sitemap files
  2. Headache Reason - You have to manage two versions of WP core, plugins, and template files
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  • One reason would be to departmentalize the site if a company or in many cases Schools and universities have multi departments where heads of departments would need to manage their own. Besides this would be great for optimization!
    – samjco-com
    Dec 2, 2021 at 19:33

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