WordPress.com

1. felciano
   Member
   May 26, 2012, 9:38 PM

   Hello all --

   Is there a way to collect and centrally (re)post from a network of multiple, related blogs into a single parent blog?

   We run one main lifestyle blog, and several related but more topically-focused blogs, e.g. Health, Finance, and Education. I would like keep these blogs distinct, as they seem to be growing distinct audiences over time, but be able to have a single central blog that aggregates posts from these others into a sort of master home page that can serve as a good overview for new visitors. Ideally I'd also like to find a theme for this master blog that lets me select and highlight a single "sticky" featured post from each of these blogs.

   Is there some way to configure a suite of related WP blogs in this fashion? I can probably hack something together using the RSS feeds from the different blogs, but it would be nice if there was some intelligence to the connections so that you could (for example) elect to cross-post the comment streams, or provide a "Follow This Blog" dialog box that allowed users to sign up for all of these blogs at once.

   Any suggestions?

   Thanks in advance for your help,

   Ramon

   The blog I need help with is minimalistmama.wordpress.com.

2. thesacredpath
   Member
   May 26, 2012, 10:09 PM

   Short answer is there is no way to post to multiple wordpress.com sites. That is a tool sploggers (spam bloggers) use and so it will not likely ever be supported here.

   And besides that, having duplicate content on the web is a sure way to get your sites tossed into the dumpster by the search engines, especially with the latest changes by Google. They are getting serious about stamping out duplicate content.

   And why would you want to compete against yourself for placement in the search engines - which is what duplicate content does? You will not increase your exposure, you will do just the opposite.

   Duplicate content = really, really, really bad idea.

   Also if the sites are here on wordpress.com, you might even wake up to find them all suspended. WordPress.com doesn't care for duplicate content either.

   You can reblog posts from one to the other, which inserts a short excerpt with a link back to the original post.

3. timethief
   Member
   May 26, 2012, 10:12 PM

   Is there a way to collect and centrally (re)post from a network of multiple, related blogs into a single parent blog?

   Aside from using RSS widgets http://en.support.wordpress.com/widgets/rss-widget/ the answer is "no". Are you aware of how Google views duplicated content acress domains? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66359

4. felciano
   Member
   May 26, 2012, 10:32 PM

   Hi thesacredpath and timethief --

   Thanks for your quick responses. Maybe I'm going about this the wrong way. What we're trying to do is emulate what magazine sites do, e.g. http://www.realsimple.com/, where there are topic-based sub-sites (Food & Recipes, Home & Organizing, etc), each of which have their own top-level navigation scheme, feeds, featured posts, comment threads, etc. However the main / top-level site ALSO includes posts from those topic-specific sites. I assume this isn't considered spam since it part of the same editorial space, but it still allows for a distinct identity/nav/etc for the top-level site and each topic-specific site.

   From what I can tell this appears to be a greater level of segregation than just using categories for posts. For example, each section has its own navigation scheme and doesn't show the nav for the other sections. AFAIK you cannot tie a WP.com nav/menu scheme to a particular category space.

   So maybe I should have asked the more general question: how do I go about creating a WP.com user experience that follows this sort of "one parent site plus several topically-distinct subsites" design, where each sub-site has a distinct identity defined around its navigation, posts, categories, comments, feeds, and potentially even users and site design?

   Thanks again for your help.

   Ramon

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