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I've picked up on a bit of talk about Google's duplicate content detection - not so much in defence of SPAM but to avoid clogging their index with what is primarily the same page twice.
The talk seems to be that Google drops one version and indexes the other.
I am about to launch a PDA version of my site. The site will live at [pda.mydomain.com,...] with the main site being, of course, [mydomain.com....]
The main site will link directly to the PDA version. The content as far as text is concerned will be identical, as both sites are served by the same source code, the only difference being CSS.
What I don't want of course is Google deciding to index the pda.mydomain.com instead of the www.mydomain.com.
Is this likely to happen?
Trouble is robots.txt is the same file at www.mydomain.com or pda.mydomain.com...
I would make sure you have a different title tag (or modified somewhat) and you can probably offer somewhat of a different content by leaving several things out (or else why have the pda-version) and putting a few new things in, good links to other pda-versions of related sites etc.
However I am not really sure. So if you are sure you don't want the pda-version in google, it's probably easiest to just put a meta-tag noindex, nofollow in the head part of the pages of the pda-version.
You could still do it, just add the pda version of your site into your robots...For example (snagged from google)
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /groups
Disallow: /images
Disallow: /catalogs
Disallow: /catalog_list
Disallow: /news
Disallow: /PDA
Whatever the address, just put it in your robots.txt and you should be fine...You could also just put a no index meta tag in each page like ruserious described.
