Duplicate content due to credit card testing
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I recently launched a site -
http://www.footballtriviaquestions.co.uk
and the site uses Paypal. In order to test the PayPal functionality I set up a zapto.org domain via a permanent IP service that points directly to the computer I've written the website on.
It appears that Google has now indexed the zapto.org website.
Will this cause problems to my main website, as the zapto.org website will pretty much contain content that is an exact duplicate of what is held on the main website.
I've looked in Google webmaster tools for the main website and it doesn't mention any duplicate content, but I'm currently not in the top 50 ranking for "football trivia questions' on Google despite SEOMoz ranking my home page with an A rating. The page does rank at position 16 in Yahoo and Bing. This seems odd to me, although I do have very few back links pointing to my site.
If the duplicate content is likely to be causing me problems what would be the best way to knock the zapto.org results out of Google
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Thanks for the info John, I've added the tags you suggest. Does anyone know how likely this is to have affected the main sites Google rankings?
Also, is there any way to know if Google has removed the zapto site from it's index. I've been doing a number of 'site:<sitename>.zapto.org' searches over the past few days and have seen no decrease in the number of pages that are indexed.</sitename>
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Yes, it will be seen as duplicate content .... They are both identical websites.
Firstly I would immediately add rel canonical tag to each page indexed on the zapto.org website pointing to the page on your main website. I would alos add noidex meta tag to the zapota pages also
You could also set up redirects on the Zapota website to redirect to your main website
Lastly, you could remove the Zapota website, its just a subdomain of the domain Zapota, or that is how it appears in the search results
Hope that helps
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