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I have built a platform where our customers can sign up for a website and just select the information from their database to show on the website.

Currently we tell our customers to point the www cname record to our service - store.nlis.com and then the system figures out which site to show based on the requesting url.

Does pointing all our customers sites to this one URL via cname hurt SEO?

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  • I'm confused. To me, you would have separate subdomains for each customer such as customer1.store.nlis.com, customer2.store.nlis.com, customer3.store.nlis.com, etc where each one belongs to each customer. Is that what you're trying to get at?
    – Mike -- No longer here
    Commented Jun 11, 2015 at 23:17
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    As well, it would all depend on how the page is generated. There is a lot more to consider here than just what you have told us. How are you adding unique value to each site that will differentiate it from any other site? If each site is scant on content and pages, then there will be a problem. If the content appears the same from site to site, then you have a problem. There is a lot to consider.
    – closetnoc
    Commented Jun 11, 2015 at 23:39

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As Sub domain behaves like a new domain, therefore they do not effect the seo of main site or server rather directory do like example.com/customer1 but if spamming is to much on sub domain , then it will be harmfull for your ip and complete server in terms of SEO

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From the sounds of it you have one application set up that takes the hostname of domain entered and determines what site is being viewed based on that.

If that is the case there could be a lot of overlap with the content of each site, I would imagine. If so, it could be considered "duplicate content" to some extent, which could hurt your results in the search engines.

A lot of the written content would be the same, as would images. I would also assume that the URLs to most of the pages on the site would be the same as well regardless of which domain name was visited.

Here's what Google has to say (emphasis mine):

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

  • Discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down pages targeted at mobile devices
  • Store items shown or linked via multiple distinct URLs
  • Printer-only versions of web pages

Source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en

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