Greetings, Out IT dept created a subdomain for testing purposes - it was a mirror of our main website - testing.maindomain.com Although google wasn't "supposed" to be able to find it, it did, and now google has two urls indexed for every page on our site - the main site and a subdomain url. Should we attempt to 301 these subdomain urls to their root domain counterparts? Or should we just block the subdomain with robots.txt or just delete the subdomain? I'm assuming we have duplicate content issues with this - any advice on how to solve this problem would be appreciated.
Yes - I would guess google would penalize both sides a little if the content is duplicate. Maybe keeping google out w/ the robots.txt is the best idea. Shouldn't have to totally delete it, since you may still want it for testing
If google will penalize duplicate content it will penalize the later one not the your original site, and I suggest it will be better to block it with robots.txt!