Sub Domain rel=canonical to Main Domain

[Joseph-Vodafone]

Just a quick one, i have the following example scenario.

Main Domain: http://www.test.com

Sub Domain: http://sub.test.com

What I am wondering is I can add onto the sub domain a rel=canonical to the main domain. I dont want to de-index the whole sub domain just a few pages are duplicated from the main site.

Is it easier to de-index the individual sub domain pages or add the rel=canonical back to the main domain.

Much appreciated

Joseph

[GastonRiera]

Hi there,

The Rel=canonical will not de-index those pages.

To de-index, add a rel=robots with a noindex tag. And also add the rel=canonical or just redirect 301 the page. Of course, do it to those selected pages only.

Hope it helps.
GR.

[Linda-Vassily]

Canonicalizing http://sub.test.com to http://www.test.com will tell Google that those two individual pages are the same and it should only index http://www.test.com--it won't affect other pages on the subdomain.

If you only have a few subdomain pages that are duplicates of root domain pages, you can just use canonicals to indicate which pages you want indexed. You won't need to noindex the duplicate ones--they will fall out of Google's index naturally once Google sees which are the preferred, canonical ones.