SEO, Subdomains & Duplicate Content

[suarve]

Hi,

I'm doing some SEO for a client on an ecommerce website - I don't have acess to the source files at all. They have their main site, store.com and a subdomain they use for Google base, base.store.com. I'm aware this is a very odd way to setup a google base feed, but it's what I've kind of inherited. This is all fine, apart from the fact that Google has indxed both versions of the site in it's entirity.

So for example, for a particular product listed in google store.com/products/some-tv there is also base.store.com/products/some-tv

This is obviously a pretty bad duplicate content issue.

Now my options here are to add a canonical tag to each page on the subdomain, that points to the main website - the client's web company has said this will be done for free, so I'll be getting them to do this. However, is this adequate as Google has already indexed the duplicated site in it's entirity? I'm also tempted to say add in a htaccess rule to redirect all requests for the sub domain to the main site.

What do you think?

Thanks

 

[GravyMonster]

So long as one of the sites 301 redirects to the other, Google won't penalise you for duplicate content.

Once you've done that I'd get on to google and request they remove one of the indexed sites from their listings - but bear in mind this can take aaaaaaaaaaaaaaages.

 

[AJK]

Is base.store.com all just a duplicate of store.com? If so then yes, just change base.store.com to 301 redirect to store.com in all cases. Problem solved.

 

[blade007]

Hi,

I'm doing some SEO for a client on an ecommerce website - I don't have acess to the source files at all. They have their main site, store.com and a subdomain they use for Google base, base.store.com. I'm aware this is a very odd way to setup a google base feed, but it's what I've kind of inherited. This is all fine, apart from the fact that Google has indxed both versions of the site in it's entirity.

So for example, for a particular product listed in google store.com/products/some-tv there is also base.store.com/products/some-tv

This is obviously a pretty bad duplicate content issue.

Now my options here are to add a canonical tag to each page on the subdomain, that points to the main website - the client's web company has said this will be done for free, so I'll be getting them to do this. However, is this adequate as Google has already indexed the duplicated site in it's entirity? I'm also tempted to say add in a htaccess rule to redirect all requests for the sub domain to the main site.

What do you think?

Thanks

Very true. Google treats subdomains as independent sites. So they will have separate listings and everything.

For duplicate content, it's only really a problem on one site, so if you had stacks of pages all looking the same it would ignore about 90% of them.

Dup content is not a problem using different sites, and hence in Google's current algo it's not a problem either.

To give you an idea - an article can go viral and go around 5,000 websites. Google will index all that.