Are sub domains considered completely different than the root domain?

[ciznerguy]

short answer is yes as long as the content is available for crawl that will be duplicaed content.

please elaborate of he goal of this duplication so I can try to tackle this problem

[tripled511]

I guess I should explain a little more. I realize that it is going to be duplicate content but would Google have to choose between the two pages as which one to show or would the sub-domain page be allowed to rank as well as the root domain page? All thing being equal of course.

E.g. A tractor re-seller sells John Deere Tractors. They have since signed a white label deal to be the official reseller of John Deere Tractors. They have a page for the riding model x at www.example.com/riding-mower-x that ranks very well. But they also have a new white label page now for the exact same mower. They want both pages to rank and not force google to choose which page to show. Would Google look at the sub-domain page of ridingmowerx.example.com as a completely different site so that it would not have to choose and could rank both pages?

[ciznerguy]

Do not create exact copies of the site.

Google will not choose they will just "punish" your site and have it dropped.

If you must create a copy of the site, make it unique.

It is very important

[ak1lz]

Google treats sub domains as a different site in a sense.. and hardly ever passes any benefit of the root domain to the sub domain. Usually, your root domain would rank higher than the sub domain.. naturally.. unless your sub domain has better seo on/off site.

If both pages were equal it would show both. but would have to choose which one would receive the better ranking.

[tripled511]

Thats perfect. Thank you.

The only issue I have is that in this scenario I am going to have to use close to duplicate title tags, h1's and URL's. Since each page is going after the exact same keyword. But if you are saying that Google has no problem with ranking these 2 pages because one of them is on a sub-domain than that solves at least one problem.

[Saijo.George]

There is not enough information here to give you the right answer, but here is my 2 cents on the topic

Say you need these duplicate pages to exist for some reason and do NOT want them to be indexed . You can noindex them and have them in the subdomain. So they do not appear in the SERPs and are not duplicate content because Google ignores them. ( Think of it this way : you are telling google , these are duplicate pages and its not meant for the search results )

Say you need these duplicate pages to be indexed , then you use rel canonical on the duplicate pages all tell Google the main page you want to be indexed.  ( Think of it this way : you are telling google , these are duplicate pages and you want importance to go to the main one ) FYI : over time this means the other pages will fade away in SERPs

What you don't want to do : put duplicate pages up on sub domain and making no effort to advise the bots they are duplicate .. They will figure it out and that is when they dont like it .

Hope that clears up your doubts , if you need a more specific answer . We will need more info on what exactly you are trying to achieve .

[tripled511]

Thanks Saijo,

That is exactly what we are going to do. We are going to use the canonical tag on the new duplicate pages referencing the existing pages that have achieved rank. Quick question on that, do you know if "juice" is transferred through a canonical tag? The new pages will be getting some pretty great links but not enough to rank highly. Will this juice be passed to the existing pages through the canonical tag?

[Saijo.George]

Yes they do

Just so you know , when you add a rel canonical the duplicate pages will drop from the SERPs eventually ( assuming google accepts the rel canonical , they don't always do it )

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

[Cyrus-Shepard]

In the case of duplicate content, you always have to tell the search engines which is the canonical (the authoritative version). It doesn't matter if they are on the same website, different sub-domains, or completely different websites.

If you leave it up to Google to choose, often the ranking power of both pages is diminished, and if you have too much duplicate content, your entire site can suffer.

Either choose the page you want to rank, and send the appropriate signals to search engines, or create different content for different pages.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Unfortunately, it doesn't work this way. See my comment above.

[ciznerguy]

Cyrus is right!