A website I'm currently working on requires there to be both a residential and commercial version of the website.
The two versions will be quite similar across the board, but the copy will have some differences, and the images used will be different. This is to make them more targeted for their particular audience. The difference in copy will generally be pretty minor, maybe a sentence or two on some pages. There will also be a couple of pages that are in the residential version and not the commercial version (and maybe vice-a-averse).
Just trying to think of the best way to do it really.
On the initial visit, the user will be on a landing page and then they choose commercial or residential. From that point on they'll have an option in the menu to change to the other version, but the landing page won't appear again.
I guess the two major issues are what's best for SEO and what's best for the user experience.
Firstly, should I be using the URL to differential the sites (eg commercial.mysite.com
& residential.mysite.com
or mysite.com/commercial/
& mysite.com/residential
), or should I use a session variable to store the version selected. For a number of reasons it seems that using the URL would be best, but then I'm concerned about the SEO implications of this. Would there be a duplicate content penalty?
Are there any other things I should be thinking about regarding SEO specific to the fact I’ll have two versions of the website?