Member Avatar for remcov

Hello,

I just noticed that google is indexing multiple daniweb subdomains while searching for my sitename, sorry if it is against the policy to post a search for my site its hard to get the same result in google. This caused big google problems for an other site my company was develloping. Duplicate content penalties and stuff, we even lost the site from the index for a while.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seomagnifier&btnG=Google+Search

My advice would be disable all the subdomains and only allow the ones you need.

Best regards ,

Remco

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Dani AI

Generated

This thread highlights a common SEO problem: identical pages served from multiple hostnames (subdomains or alternate domains) can split signals and make Google choose one version to show. spotted the duplicates, correctly noted Google typically suppresses duplicate entries rather than issuing a blanket “penalty,” and has started to act. Practical, short-term and long-term fixes follow.

  1. Inventory everything. Verify a Domain property in Google Search Console, inspect representative URLs with the URL Inspection tool, and check server logs for which hostnames Googlebot is crawling.
  2. Pick a single canonical host you control (preferably the HTTPS version you want users to land on).
  3. Consolidate: implement server-side permanent redirects (301) or canonical link elements pointing to that host, update sitemaps and all internal links, and ensure SSL covers the canonical name.
  4. For content duplicated on an external site you do not control, request removal or a canonical link from that site; use a DMCA only when appropriate; use Search Console removals only as a temporary emergency measure.

Technical cautions: do not rely on blocking with robots.txt if you plan to use meta noindex, because crawlers must be allowed to fetch the page to see a noindex tag. rel=canonical is a strong hint but a 301 redirect is more definitive for permanent moves. If you must remove content immediately, returning 410 (Gone) communicates intent clearly to crawlers.

After changes, monitor Search Console coverage and the URL Inspection results, and expect it to take days or weeks for Google to reprocess index and ranking signals. Implementing consistent canonicalization and fixing incoming links to the chosen host will prevent signal fragmentation and restore cleaner search visibility.

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Member Avatar for stymiee

Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content on websites anymore. They just filter it out now.

Member Avatar for Dani

It looks as if they've correctly set these subdomains up to be supplemental results.

Member Avatar for remcov

Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content on websites anymore. They just filter it out now.

I would be carefull, subdomains are still considdered different websites. This essentially makes google believe daniweb has multiple different copies, can not be good even if you get no penalty for this practice.

We had big problems in ranking cause of this mistake with 1 website, not to long ago. Someone thought it smart to link to subdomains with our keywords in it.... After fixing it ranking came back to normal.

Member Avatar for Dani

On second thought, it wouldn't hurt to block the subdomains :) I'll have my systems administrator go ahead and do that.

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