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I have a site that is for a realtor and its URL is say, homesforsale.example but the actual listings are housed within an MLS/IDX system that is currently set to search.homesforsale.example. The client wants to have all the URLs under the sub-domain (search.homesforsale.example) to look as if they are under homesforsale.example not as a sub-domain but the only way I can think of doing that is CLOAKING which I do not want to do, especially because of the potentially negative SEO.

The client is convinced he wants to rank for homesforsale.example/community/some-community instead of search.homesforsale.example/i/some-community. (The 'i' is built into the unchangeable structure of URLs that the MLS/IDX system creates.)

Can anyone think of a way of doing this legitimately without being penalized for either duplicate content or flat out URL masking?

Stephen Ostermiller
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Bowman
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    A reverse proxy is exactly the use case (making content at URL X appear at URL Y). Do note there are potential consequences though on the content of the pages, and specially links (if they are absolute and using X...). The real long term solution being of course to change the global architecture so that the pages are at the proper spot and not in a subdomain, if the client does not want a subdomain. – Patrick Mevzek Oct 06 '22 at 21:41
  • Is the MLS/IDX system giving unique pages or is it giving the same pages to all realitors? If it is not unique that may be why they had to put it in a subdomain they may have had problems with sites by putting it in a directory on the site. While a subdomain gets looked at more like a separate site. – Wayne Smith Oct 06 '22 at 22:05
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    "the only way I can think of doing that is CLOAKING" - How would you do this with"cloaking"?! "without being penalized for either duplicate content or flat out URL masking" - how can you be penalized for "URL masking"? Unless you can control direct user access to the subdomain (ie. prevent it) then "duplicate content" is always going to be an issue. – MrWhite Oct 07 '22 at 00:39
  • 2 ways, you can do it. Route A: use 301 redirects, so they essentially become one single response. Route B: use a canonical meta tag to identify which is the one that should rank. – Luis Alberto Barandiaran Oct 07 '22 at 05:00
  • I agree with MrWhite that it doesn't sound like cloaking, it sounds more like duplicate content. This resource might be helpful for you: What is duplicate content and how can I avoid being penalized for it on my site? – Stephen Ostermiller Oct 07 '22 at 14:42
  • I must have neglected to say that currently I have homesforsale.com/community/some-community pages redirected with 301s to search.homesforsale.com/i/some-community and in my opinion that is good enough. What was I asking if there was a better way to achieve the client's goal. In my opinion, there isn't but I am asking for advice. thanks @LuisAlbertoBarandiaran – Bowman Oct 07 '22 at 15:35
  • @MrWhite presumably by cloaking they mean embedding the content in an IFRAME - This means the content is not duplicated. IFRAMES are certainly not a great look for a website and likely have SEO penalties associated with them. – davidgo Dec 06 '22 at 08:09

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