I'm trying to make a website where the content changes slightly depending on who sent them there (but the site design and most of the content will stay the same). For instance, I have a group of people figuratively named:

John
Pete
Brian

And my website is www.website.com. Now, I'll store their individual data in a row in a mySQL table, and I want to pull their personal data from the table and insert it in the website when they send someone. My first question is, should I do this by creating subdomains or putting a variable in the url? The website is going to be a Word Press website, so I could have:

john.website.com
pete.website.com
brian.website.com

And just put the index.php file in the subdomain directory and Word Press would know that it's installation is in a different folder (the root folder) and work normally (I think). Then I could check the url of the website in php and grab the subdomain and use that in my query getting the personalized data.

Or, I could use variables in the url, like:

www.website.com/?person=john
www.website.com/?person=pete
www.website.com/?person=brian

And use GET to grab the person from the url and use that when querying the data.

There will also be more pages then just the homepage, such as www.website.com/my-hobbies. So for John the two methods would look like:

john.mywebsite.com/my-hobbies

and

www.website.com/my-hobbies/?person=john


Which would be better for SEO? I still would want the SEO to be best for the root website (i.e. www.website.com and it's child pages) and for it to show up in search results first.

Any thoughts?

Thanks for your advice!

Which would be better for SEO? I still would want the SEO to be best for the root website (i.e. www.website.com and it's child pages) and for it to show up in search results first.

All of them,
None of them,
Any of them.

All of them,
None of them,
Any of them.

Could you elaborate?

Is there a better way, or one that you think would work best?

I appreciate your advice.

There is no "better way" any method is as good as the other, it's how the pages ar PROMOTED that makes the difference.

BTW Why not just use Wordpress MU rather than reinvent the wheel?

The multisite option in Wordpress seemed really complicated and more difficult than, say, just appending "?person=John" to the url and making a few database calls in php to change the content.

The thing is, I'm probably going to have several dozen people (eventually maybe over a hundred, I'm not sure at this point), and I'm afraid that the multisite option in Wordpress is going to be really difficult.

Seems to work Ok on Wordpress.com with thousand of users.


Basically all it needs is to configure wildcard DNS and a couple of lines in .htaccess. The script handles the rest as users signup or are created.

One last question about if I do this with the variable in the URL. Say there's a page here: www.website.com/tropical-fruits. If there are links on the internet to the page (which has *slight* differences depending on the name in the variable):

www.website.com/tropical-fruits
www.website.com/tropical-fruits?person=John
www.website.com/tropical-fruits?person=Pete

If someone were to search Google for "tropical fruits," and supposing that my website was in the top results, which of those above links would be more likely to show up? The base URL, or one of the URLs with a variable in it?

The one with most links pointing to it.

OK, thanks. I wasn't sure if the "base URL" would have more "weight" or whatever you want to call it

Thanks for all your advice.