Same site indexed in multiple forms of urls

[emiley jones]

Hi,

My client's website is around 8 years old having a page rank of 6. It also maintains a decent alexa. The website has more than 10000 pages indexed in google as well as in other search engines.

However i found that this website is indexed in multiple forms in Google. A url www.domain.com is indexed in the following ways :

www.example.com
ci.example.com

All the above pages are indexed in Google and shows the same content and often the recent versions. None of these URLS have a redirect. A site: command shows that many more pages (hundreds of them) are indexed in this fashion and some of them are even supplemental results.The content of the site is good and is updated every week.

Being indexed in Google in so many ways is not good. Most of the above sites, apart from the main (www.domain.com) does not show any PR which implies the fact that PR leakage is minimum from those urls.

I need to solve this problem.

Pls help

[edited by: tedster at 6:07 pm (utc) on April 30, 2007]
[edit reason] switched to example.com - it can never be owned [/edit]

[tedster]

Sounds like you need to do something to stop the ci.example.com subdomain from resolving to the same content as the www.example.com subdomain. You might do one of these:

1. take down the "ci" subdomain so that a 404 is returned when those urls are requested
2. use a 301 redirect from the "ci" urls to the "www" version

If you also have content on ci.example.com that is unique and not duplicated on www.example.com then your job becomes a bit more complex, but not extremely so. Just make sure that no user agent, including googlebot, gets a 200 status code for two addresses that return the same content.

[crimson090]

I believe I am in the same boat. I have a website that I reserved 6 similar sounding domains for. However, Google results often return different pages at different domains, so for instance the About Us page is at one domain while the Marketplace is at another domain.

I had setup each domain to just serve the same files from the same directory. Should I instead go into my hosting control panel and setup the other domains to simply forward to the main domain?

Thanks!

[tedster]

Not just "forward", but permanently redirect -- with a 301 status code in the http header that the serves sends.

The words "domain forwarding" are used imprecisely for all kinds of technical actions. The only approach that Google recommends and that will straighten out the duplicate url problems that multiple domains sometimes create is a 301 permanent redirect.

The precise details on how to do this will depend on your particular server. Apache is different from IIS (we have deddicated forums here for each server type) and you may also need help from tech support at your webhost in some situations. Some hosts simply are not set up for you to create these 301 redirects.