Duplicate content or not

[grimmer]

In the past several months, google has indexed same content on our site under several host names:
mail.<domain>.com
[<domain>.com...]
www.<domain>.com

same content shows up on all three hosts in google index, will this be considered as duplicate content by google? or, google is just smart enough to understand that this is the same content crawled from different hosts.

Will this be a possible case to be punished by Panda release? since we were hit really bad by panda.

Shall we do 301 redirect to point all other hosts to www.<domain>.com?

Please advise.

[tedster]

Yes, it is duplicate content - the kind of thing that is called a canonical error. A 301 redirect is the ideal way to handle it. However, it is unlikely that this is the only factor in a Panda devaluation.

But definitely fix it, and then see where things stand.

[grimmer]

tedster, thanks for the advice.

In the past two months, we have done many improvements on the site, including removing duplicate content, thin content, improving user navigation, however, there is no significant improvement yet.

We discovered this issue early this week, and hope this is only major issue left.

we will implement 301 redirect and see how it goes. Thanks.