Hello all. I've recently noticed a problem with google with a possible duplicate content/content being indexed incorrectly.

Lets assume my domain name is greensmiley.com. Some of my site is being indexed correctly as greensmiley.com, while other parts are being indexed under the hosts provided domain: greensmiley.bluesmiley.com.

Now I would obviously prefer everything be indexed under "greensmiley.com".

I understand a .htaccess 301 redirect would be best, but there lies the problem. The site is a forum and the actual domain greensmiley.com tends to be blocked on not only mine, but at many members place of work where they tend to do the most of their posting. And the 301 redirect would change the domain they are entering on "greensmiley.bluesmiley.com" to "greensmiley.com" and therefore they, and I, would be barred from posting a good chunk of the day.

I was wondering what could be done to allow the users to continue to enter on "greensmiley.bluesmiley.com" but make google index all pages as "greensmiley.com".

Is there a way to set the 301 redirect to apply only to search engines? If not, could I block "greensmiley.bluesmiley.com*" in the robots.txt file? If I block it in the robots.txt I would obviously lose whatever SERP those posts had, but would search engines then find it at "greensmiley.com" eventually?

I understand it's quite a crazy little problem here and I was hoping someone knew of a way to pull this off.

I suggest try to put a note on your site, whether its a pop up or a a big text note on top of the forum before they log in.

I think you should try including the subdomain site to robots.txt or you should add noindex nofollow attribute to pages in the subdomain site.
And don't worry about the SERP ranking of those subdomain pages. You will eventually get that SERP ranking for your actual site.

I think this has been misunderstood to a point.

greensmiley.com/index is the exact same page as greensmiley.bluesmiley.com/index, and every single page is like that.

Both greensmiley.com and greensmiley.bluesmiley.com sit as two domains pointed towards the same exact server. bluesmiley.com is my host, and they provide the greensmiley.bluesmiley.com domain, while I purchased the greensmiley.com domain and would prefer google index only that information.

Read up on this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonicalization

Yes, URL normalization is what I am trying to acheive.

If I placed in my robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: http://greensmiley.bluesmiley.com/

Would this still allow greensmiley.com to be indexed, but force the search engines to ignore greensmiley.bluesmiley.com?

yah robots.txt

then use google webmaster to have the currently indexed pages removed from google

have you checked in your hosts control panel? you should be able to put in redirects to send everything to greensmiley.com.

Try reading this article on doing your .htaccess file:

http://perishablepress.com/press/200...-via-htaccess/

This article about Matt Cutts stand about Duplicate Content might help you:

http://www.marketingwords.com/blog/?p=769

Originally Posted by francis84

This article about Matt Cutts stand about Duplicate Content might help you:

http://www.marketingwords.com/blog/?p=769

A bit, thanks anyways

you should watch Matt Cutts video on youtube to get clearer explanation on this.