Using one WordPress install that gives different domains for article pages

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The situation today

I currently have x standalone news sites each with their own domain (news.sitename.co.uk, news.sitename.com, news.sitename.com.au etc). The journalist uses one custom built CMS to publish articles to specific domains. A reader on one domain can only view on that domain what has been published to that domain. Finally, each article published has just the one URL for the domain that it has been published to.

Where I want to get to

I want to move to a new CMS that lets any journalist publish content to any country domain in the network (let’s call this the ‘parent domain’) and – the tricky part – lets any reader view that article from any domain that the user happens to be on.

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So, for example, as a user who visits the UK site, I could opt to see content appear on the UK site that has been published to other ‘parent domains’ (.com.au, .com etc).

What I’d appreciate comment on

The issue of one article having multiple URLs across several TLDs. Is this possible in WordPress/advisable?

I’m assuming that for the above scenario to work, WordPress would have to give each article that is published to a ‘parent domain’ a list of all the other URLs for the other domains so that the article can appear on all those domains? Can WordPress do that? We would of course specify to the search engines the preferred version of the URL (the country site that the journalist posted/tagged it to initially).

Is this the best approach?

I appreciate that it is not your typical WP installation, but if anyone knows how best to tackle this I would greatly appreciate the input.

Essentially we’re looking to provide a user experience that let’s the user on one country news site view content that we publish elsewhere to other ‘parent domains’ from the site that they are on without having to navigate away from their preferred site.

Finally

We’re looking at outsourcing development of this project and I’d welcome any approaches from those interested. I can then provide more detail to those that respond.

Thanks,

Dave

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1 comment

  1. If I understood everything correctly, you want to have the same content across different domains: if a user comes from co.uk or .com, you want to keep the entered domain in your browser to give your users a “better localized” experience.

    Don’t do it.

    Users won’t have a better experience. It doesn’t make sense this setup you’re into, only if you were to provide different content based on domain. You don’t need to keep your users away when they go to your content from different domains, redirect them.

    In fact, doing what you want do more harm then good because this is content duplication: following google search engine optimization guide, you should provide one version of a URL to reach a document (p.9/22). Not doing it means you’re splitting the reputation of the content between the urls.

    Choose a dominant url (if .co.uk is more important because you have a business in london, IMO stick to it) and do a 301 redirect for non-preffered URLS (the other ones).

    You don’t need to change your CMS to WordPress to create these redirects. But if you’re using an old, proprietary CMS, and would like to change, WordPress is a great solution and it’s plugin ecosystem is really good.

    Good luck and welcome to SO!