Subdomains and duplicate content issue

[McTaggart]

Hi, a website I know of, let's call it Americanizedwine.com, is undergoing development. It includes a detailed map of hundreds wine growers right across the Americas, with all the map grower icons / names pointing to unique pages within Americanizedwine.com (info pages with online retail functionality where wine grower wants to sell direct through this website).

This website is teaming up with wine magazines / food blogs etc., offering them subdomains of Americanzedwine.com - e.g. [magazinename].americanizedwine.com - to carry within their own websites > duplicating the map and all the wine grower/retail pages from Americanwizedwine.com website, including meta data, etc (hmmmm!).

Could you simply use some method to simply tell Google that the mother website is elsewhere, and this subdomain information is simply duplicate copy? Would that suffice I’m wondering? Or will the solution here require deeper exploration?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Hmm, you should either set a canonical url to the main site or noindex the other pages.

Since your main site already has all the information, the other subdomains won't rank for any terms anyways and you may be hit with duplicate content problems. Setting a canonical link will prevent the subdomains from ranking and any links built to that page will help your main site rank better. On the downside, the subdomains wont rank.

[MattAntonino]

What Oleg said - the pages should be no-index.  They aren't for search engines, they're for the magazines.  I wouldn't necessarily set canonical for all those pages because I'm not a fan of having 50 pages say their real link is something else.  In your situation, just no-index anything that's for people, not SEs.

[McTaggart]

Thanks Oleg and Matt for the really helpful feedback