duplicate content by a subdomain

[SEO Guy]

Google Showing subfolder instead of subdomain

I have a new forum www.realestatewebmasters.com and its getting picked up really well by G, however it is hosted as a virtual subdomain of seo-guy.com with the path being http://www.seo-guy.com/realestate/ and for some reason Google is listing but www.realestatewebmasters.com and www.seo-guy.com/realestate/ This is really causing me grief as I can figure out why the www.seo-guy.com/realestate/ is getting picked up and listed, I dont want it to be and its causing a duplicate content issue (Hasnt been picked up yet but I dont want to chance it)

Whats worse is that the wrong path is getting picked up for serps

Check out this search for Minneapolis lofts

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=Minneapolis+lofts

Anyone with experience in the whole virtual hosting/subdomain field wanna help me out here, I want to get www.seo-guy.com/realestate/ to stop showing up in google but I dont think I can just block it or I will be blocking www.realestatewebmasters.com which I want in the serps and is the same thing.

HELP!

Thanks Guys

[disgust]

I'm pretty sure that blocking it via robots.txt only blocks by the url, and nothing more.

but just a side-note... the "good" url (the real one) has a PR6, the subdomain one has a PR0..

it's been mentioned a ton of times in the past, but simply "not linking" to a certain part of your site doesn't assure that it won't be found by google. the toolbar, apache index directories, and stat reports can all give them away.

[sarahk]

Putting the links in here won't have helped.

Add the following to your .htaccess file and Google will see it as a permanent move and not penalise, plus your visitors will also get pointed to the right domain

redirect 301 /realestate/(.*) http:// (http://bots.pcpropertymanager.com/$1)www.realestatewebmasters.com (http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/)/$1 (http://bots.pcpropertymanager.com/$1)
Plus this should take the visitor to the page they have requested, not just the index page.

Sarah

[Owlcroft]

The first thing that comes to mind is necessarily the .htaccess file for the main seo-guy.com site.

But that would not explain the listing under both forms, unless that file was changed. Looking at G's caches, I see that the wrong form is showing 2:32PM, while the right form's cache is showing 3:24 PM (of course, we don't know that those are from the same day). Is there any chance that some typo in the .htaccess file was fixed during that span of time?

[Nicky21]

Duplicate content issue.
1st of all: i'm nowhere near a seo expert.

but my idea:
1)
...../realestate/ - rename it!
ex: -> ..../realestate_notlinkedbyanybody/

2)
using .htaccess host the virtual site on the renamed link.

Results:
1) google comes and gets a dead url on ..../realestate/ ; maybe you should use a permanent redirect;
2) ...../realestate_notlinkedbyanybody/ will be nowhere to be found on the net (as long as you dont post stuff that gives it away, like links to it) so it wont exist in google's cache in a couple of days (hopefully).

I know that because i just did it 2-3 days ago for my site (www.)crea-soft(.com)
check out the nice almost 2000 html pages.... they are actually made using mod_rewrite...

I dunno if this will work though, still waiting to see if i'm gonna get penalized by google for uplicate content... but i see no reason to do that if it's linked and turn out to be 404

just my idea.:rolleyes:

AGAIN: im no seo expert.....

[Nicky21]

PS: does this forum has the feature to notify me trough mail when somebody posts a message ? :rolleyes:

[disgust]

just "not linking to something" does NOT guarantee that google (or other SE's) won't pick it up. I really don't advice just doing that, because the same problem is just likely to spring up again.

Nicky: try the usercp? :)

[john_loch]

Hi SEO Guy,

What SarahK said is good. A 301 redirect (moved permanently) is the best way to go here. Just keep in mind that some older clients (browsers) convert from a post to a get when encountering this, so you may need to watch the forum a little.

If you're really worried about duplicate content, you could put that domain on an alternate c class (IP). I wouldn't be too worried about this though. The 301 is the formal way to indicate moving house and GBot knows this.

Just do it **quickly** before volume duplication screws things up - your index frequency is pretty good on seo-guy.com as I recall.

Cheers,

John Loch

[mushroom]

Google Showing subfolder instead of subdomain

I have a new forum www.realestatewebmasters.com and its getting picked up really well by G, however it is hosted as a virtual subdomain of seo-guy.com with the path being http://www.seo-guy.com/realestate/ and for some reason Google is listing but www.realestatewebmasters.com and www.seo-guy.com/realestate/ This is really causing me grief as I can figure out why the www.seo-guy.com/realestate/ is getting picked up and listed, I dont want it to be and its causing a duplicate content issue (Hasnt been picked up yet but I dont want to chance it)

The robots.txt file will do it for you.
Ask for the folowing file to be modified http://www.seo-guy.com/robots.txt

add the lines;

User-agent: *
Disallow: /realestate/

Then www.seo-guy.com/realestate/ will not be read by the good bots.
You should all so have a www.realestatewebmasters.com/robots.txt file

with the line,

User-agent: *

to alow all bots or add lines to restrict them but that's a different subject.

[ZanderXML]

Anyone with experience in the whole virtual hosting/subdomain field wanna help me out here, I want to get www.seo-guy.com/realestate/ to stop showing up in google but I dont think I can just block it or I will be blocking www.realestatewebmasters.com which I want in the serps and is the same thing.

It's really easy. If you are using Apache Web Server then place it in VirtualHost of your www.seo-guy.com server

RedirectMatch permanent ^/realestate/(.*) http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/$1

[DarrenC]

Interesting..

Domain 1 is hosted in the UK www.mydomain1.co.uk and I have Domain 2 which does not have any webspace www.mydomain2.co.uk could I do a 301 redirect so that Domain 2 is the main URL on Domain 1's webspace?

i.e. redirect 301 www.mydomain1.co.uk (.*) http://www.mydomain2.co.uk/$1

Would this work, or is it easier just to drop Domain 1 and get my host to use Domain 2 instead?

I hope I haven't confused anyone :D

[Owlcroft]

You can pretty much redirect anything anywhere, but two questions occur to me:

1. If Domain #2 has no webspace (which I take to mean no existtance on a server), you can't redirect #1 to it--there's nothing there. Unless that was a typo, and you mean redirect calls to #2 on to #1, which does exist.

2. You may run some risk of appearing to Google to have duplicate sites. But I am not clear just how that works, since people do legitimately change domains from time to time (as from a subdomain to a new, full domain name).

[SEO Guy]

I have fixed the problem VIA htacess and a 301, thanks for your suggestions guys! :-) I guess I could have come here and said that lol but look at all the helpful info I got out of it hehe

[flawebworks]

=========
1. If Domain #2 has no webspace (which I take to mean no existtance on a server), you can't redirect #1 to it--there's nothing there. Unless that was a typo, and you mean redirect calls to #2 on to #1, which does exist.

2. You may run some risk of appearing to Google to have duplicate sites. But I am not clear just how that works, since people do legitimately change domains from time to time (as from a subdomain to a new, full domain name).
===========


Using a 301 redirect is how you do it. Check out these 2 articles:

www.bruceclay.com/SEO-tech-tips/techtips.htm
www.highrankings.com/issue060.htm

Pointing one domain to another is apparently considered spam without the 301 redirect.

Regards;

Joann