Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Here is my problem. I have a site (lets call it www.widget.com). This site has been established and ranking well for a wide variety of keywords for a couple of years now. We have link agreements with some sites, not owned by us. These agreements are for branding and traffic only, not to gain SEO links.
One of these sites (lets call it example.com) links to us from a subdomain i.e. sub.example.com for tracking reasons. The problem is that googlebots have crawled sub.example.com, followed the links and indexed a large proportion of our site under the subdomain. So, for example, we have a page (http://www.widget.com/best-widgets/). In addition to our page, Google has indexed sub.example.com/best-widgets/. This page shows the exact same content as our page.
This is obviously a duplicate content issue but we have never had any problems with this in the past. Lately I've been noticing that we won't appear for searches that we used to rank reasonably well for. I'll do a search for 'best widgets + widget.com' in Google and our page won't show up but the sub.example.com page will.
It seems to me that Google has, for some reason, established that sub.example.com is the originator of the content and that we are the duplicator.
I don't want this to happen so what can I do? The way I see it is I can:
1. Get example.com to disallow all robots to crawl sub.example.com in their robots.txt file. I have looked at the sub.example.com/robots.txt file already, and it is exactly the same os the one that appears on my site (widget.com). Is this simply because a seperate robots.txt file has not been set up yet for sub.example.com?
Will this work? Or will this also stop the robots from indexing my site, widget.com, as well as sub.example.com
2. Get example.com to use rel=nofollows on all their links that point to pages on widget.com. However, I think they will be reluctant to do this, as the work required will be extensive.
3. cancel the aragreement, which I don't really want to have to do as they bring in a lot of direct traffic for me.
Which option should I go for? Any comments on each of these solutions?
I hope this all makes sense, and thanks in advance for any responses.
Cheers,
1. Get example.com to disallow all robots to crawl sub.example.com in their robots.txt file. I have looked at the sub.example.com/robots.txt file already, and it is exactly the same os the one that appears on my site (widget.com). Is this simply because a seperate robots.txt file has not been set up yet for sub.example.com?
you can setup a robots.txt on the sub domain. it might be in a seperate folder just make sure you put it in the right spot. Once in place use webmaster tools to remove all the pages from googles cache.
2. Get example.com to use rel=nofollows on all their links that point to pages on widget.com. However, I think they will be reluctant to do this, as the work required will be extensive.
nofollow's work well also but you would have to wait for example.com to complete this on all their links to your sub domain. that might take along time.
That will preserve your traffic, consolidate your listings to be all from the one correct domain, and preserve and build the PageRank for those pages.
