Wrong URL in displayed in SERP

[bigrob]

my site has various urls as host headers all on one website.
when i search my company name in google my site appears on top of the list, however the url displayed is one of my development urls...
ie... dev.domainname.com ....
anyidea why this is? or how i can fix it?

[tedster]

Hello bigrob, and welcome to the forums.

Looks like you've allowed googlebot to crawl the subdomain. Simply put a robots.txt file at dev.example.com/robots.txt that disallows crawling. And of course, make sure that googlebot CAN crawl your production domain.

[bigrob]

Hello Tedster and thanks for the reply.
however the subdomain and site are the same thing...
the dev.domain.com is simply a host header for the www.domain.com.
absolutely no difference in the site .....
so is it still possible to create the robots.txt that disallows crawling for a certain domain name?

many thanks
bigrob

[Robert Charlton]

bigrob - This can be a duplicate content problem of the worst kind. I recommend you take a look at this thread for starters....

Duplicate Content - Get it right or perish
Setting out guidelines for a site clean of duplicate content
[webmasterworld.com...]

In my experience, once this kind of duplication creeps into Google's index, rewriting to the correct canonical url for the site is the only fix.

An incorrect link somewhere probably got this subdomain indexed. In the above thread, g1smd (in a post of 2:39 pm on Aug 29, 2006), suggests a base tag with the correct canonical as prevention for a similar sounding problem if you use relative links internally, but I don't know that it will fix the problem once you have it.

[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 8:20 am (utc) on Oct. 10, 2007]