Canonical tag vs 301 in this Panda situation - trying to wrap my brain around this!

[MarieHaynes]

Here's the situation.  Let's say you have a development site that was created on a subdomain such as examplesite.webdesign.com.  When the new site, examplesite.com launches, the developer forgot to remove examplesite.webdesign.com from the index.  As such, two copies of the site exist.  Because the development site existed first, examplesite.com ends up being affected by Panda and drops out of the search results.  As a result only the development site is visible on Google searches.

I've been trying to wrap my head around whether using canonical tags or 301 redirects would be best.

On one hand you could insert a canonical tag on each page of the subdomain to tell Google that the correct version to index is examplesite.com.

On the other hand you could do a 301 redirect from every page of the development site to to examplesite.com.

Now, here's where it gets complicated.  Because the new site has been flagged as a Panda site, in either case will it need to see a Panda refresh in order to be included in the index?

[Matthew_Edgar]

Hey Marie,

If it wasn't for the Panda situation, I would say you should 301 redirect the subdomain back to the main site. I've had to do that more than once (unfortunately) and a redirect has worked every time to remove the development subdomain from the search results.

However, because of the Panda flag, that may result in both the main site and the subdomain site getting flagged by Panda and thus both sites falling out of the index (which might make it even harder to regain).

Here is one thought. Is it possible to redirect a few pages on the subdomain and put a canonical on a few other pages on the subdomain? That way you could see what happens with those pages. If I were you, I would test out both options before applying to the whole site and I'd test on the most insignificant pages there are on the site (privacy policy, terms and conditions, etc.)

This is a really interesting question and I'll be anxious to hear what others have to say. Please let me know what ends up happening and how you go about fixing this.

Matthew

[EGOL]

Technically..... using 301s produces almost immediate results...  I used rel=canonical on a few hundred pages and that took months and months to take effect.  (and these were active pages with good PR and thousands of visitors per month)

What google thinks of cross-domain 301s vs. cross-domain canonicals is a whole different question.

Good luck!