Subdomains & 301's

[coop]

Hi

I have a problem which i really hope you may be able to help me with.

Our site (mydomain.com) is established and ranking well for numerous keywords. We have agreements with 2 sites, who are also authoritative but not owned by us. These sites have sub domains that point to our website.

• subdomain1.ourdomain.com
• Subdomain2.ourdomain.com



Problem 1
The problem is that the Google bots have crawled each of the sub domains e.g. subdomain1.ourdomain.com and indexed a large proportion of our site under their sub domain.

For example, we have a page //www.ourdomain.com/blue-jumpers). In addition to our page, Google has also indexed //www.subdomain1.ourdomain/blue-jumpers/. This page has the exact same content as our page and both are showing in serps. This is obviously a Duplicate content issue.

Problem 2
If I do a search on blue jumpers + mydomain in Google our sub domain page will display and not us. Has Google established that subdomain1.ourdomain.com is the originator of the content and us the duplicator?

Problem 3
Currently this issue is only displaying in serps and not in Google webmaster tools.

Will a 301 resolve this issue. How will this affect our subdomain rankings.

Thank you in advance

 

[gav240z]

Can't say for sure.

This is a tricky scenario.

I'd love to be able to give you a definitive answer but can't.

What usually happens with a 301 is that Google eventually updates with the new address in SERPS and you don't loose rankings. However because this is a cross domain issue I'm not certain what will happen.

If I was to hazard a guess I would say you should be ok and you won't disappear out of the results, but if it is absolutely critical you don't disappear at all from SERPS I would be alot more careful and possibly construct a dummy page that you can test with on each domain.