Our main domain has thousands of subdomains with same content (expired hosting), how should we handle it?

[SCAILLE]

Hello,

Our client allows users to create free-trial subdomains and once the trial expires, all the domains have the same page. If people stick, their own websites are hosted on the subdomain.

Since all these expired trials subdomains have the same content and are linking towards the Homepage, should they be nofollows?

Has anyone dealt with something similar?

Thanks very much in advance,

[jesse-landry]

Options:

1.) set rel="canonical" tags on all of them referencing the main page within the href portion of the tag

2.) no-crawl, no-index the pages

3.) all of the above

[MikeRoberts]

4. Custom 404 page?

[SCAILLE]

Hi everyone,

Thanks for your recommendations. In a way, every subdomain is custom since every client's name is different and it prompts the client to login back into cPanel to reactivate the hosting.

The subdomains are not in a way 'expired', they are expired from a customer's point of view, but they are active and there is no duplicate content, since it says 'You are trying to access x.y.com', so it is different for every subdomain.

But they are all very low quality one-page subdomains, is it useful to have them as links towards the main site?

[jesse-landry]

No. Thin content carries algorithmic penalty as well. Careful. Might want to stick with option 2.

[Jonathan1979]

I would say it is unnatural, and therefore any links you have should be no-followed.

[Jonathan1979]

This post is deleted!

[MikeRoberts]

If its essentially a duplicate, thin content Login Screen... NoIndex, No Follow the page.

[SCAILLE]

Thanks everyone, really helpful!