Subdomain Severe Duplicate Content Issue

[Metricly-Marketing]

Hi

A subdomain for our admin site has been indexed and it has caused over 2000 instances of duplicate content. To fix this issue, is a 301 redirect or canoncial tag the best option?

1. http://www.example.com/services
2. http://admin.example.com/services

Really appreciate your advice

J

[Keszi]

If the admin subdomain is used for any testing purposes, then I wouldn't redirect it. If there is no specific use for it, you could do a 301.

If it is used for testing purposes, then you could:

• block the crawlers
• noindex the pages (as Ryan mentioned it above)
• use canonical to the www. version

I hope it was helpful.

Gr., Keszi

[RyanPurkey]

Meta=NOINDEX is another option, but it sounds like the pages on your admin subdomain are getting published directly to your main site, so that could cause some major problems if that tag carried over.  Be sure to test!  Here's Google help page on this: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en

[Metricly-Marketing]

Hi Keszi

Thank you for the reply. So for the 100's of pages that are indexed, you would recommend just leaving them until they drop out rather than redirecting them?

Thank you

J

[Keszi]

Hi,

I'd completely deny access for robots to the subdomain. For this I would create a robots.txt for the subdomain (place it in the folder of the subdomain) which would state the following:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

This way your content from the subdomain won't be crawled by search engines -> no content duplication issue for search engines.

Gr., Keszi