Our site (www.mydomain.com) has been established & ranking well for a wide number of keywords for a number of years. We have agreements with 4 sites, who are also authoritative in our country but not owned by us. These sites have sub domains that all point to our site. • subdomain1.ourdomain.com • Subdomain2.ourdomain.com • Subdomain3.ourdomain.com • Subdomain4.ourdomain.com Problem 1 The problem is that the Google bots have crawled each of the sub domains e.g. subdomain1.ourdomain.com and indexed a large proportion of our site under the sub domain. For example, we have a page (http://www.ourdomain.com/blue-cars). In addition to our page, Google has also indexed (http://www.subdomain1.ourdomain/blue-cars /). This page is the exact same content as our page and both are showing in serps. This is obviously a Duplicate content issue. Problem 2 If I do a search on blue cars + mydomain in Google our sub domain page will display and not us. Has Google established that sub.example.com is the original editor of the content and us the duplicator? Problem 3 Currently this issue is only displaying in serps and not in Google webmaster tools. So I can have four pages displaying with the same title for a keyword in the first page . Why is this not an issue flagged in webmaster tools? Is it because it is a subdomain? Will a 301 resolve this issue. How will this affect our subdomain rankings. Thank you in advance
It sounds to me like the server is setup incorrectly. Is a page actually available at http://www.subdomain1.ourdomain/blue-cars? If so there shouldn't be, and you'll need to talk to your hosting company to resolve it.