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Hi Moz Community!

Our team is having an internal (and external) debate regarding the extent and implications of duplicate content for a hospitality client that I would love to get some feedback on. I unfortunately cannot divulge the brand/URL, but will give as much info as possible.

The brand in question manages dozens of properties in the US and worldwide and has recently rolled up all of the domains under a singular brand.com domain. So whereas the properties used to have their own domains (property1.com, property2.com, etc...), they are now housed in sub-folders (brand.com/property1, brand.com/property2.com and so forth).

The concern we have is that they launched the new brand site with all of the property sites/content rolled up under the new brand.com domain, however all of the individual property sites and their pages are still live as well. All of the canonicals on both brand.com as well as property1.com (property2.com, property3.com, etc...) are self-referencing (so the canonicals for brand.com/property1 and all of its sub-ages do not point to the still live property1.com and all of its sub-pages, for example).

On the brand side, they believe this is the best path forward as brand.com grows and gains some authority, with the later intent on eventually redirecting the individual property domains - but we are unclear of that timeline (though we do think its more months as opposed to days/weeks)

So our questions for the community here are:

1. What is the perceived impact in this state of limbo to the individual property sites (ideally they house the original content and have the history, but could Google still give preference to the brand.com/property URLs and/or could both of them suffer in rank/search experience from the duplicate content an non-uniform presentation?)
2. Could brand.com be "dinged" so-to-speak due to launching with this much duplicate content? (And if so, could that affect how quickly normalization occurs after the property sites are finally redirected?)
3. Anything else we should consider/Any other feedback from the community?

Thank you all for your time and support!

Bueller?

I found this article and Bing appeared to at this time have a checkbox for the option for AJAX handling although looking at the Bing Webmaster Tools it doesnt appear that this option is available.

Has it just been completely integrated now, relieving webmaster from needing to check the option or is it no longer supported?

http://searchengineland.com/bing-now-supports-googles-crawlable-ajax-standard-84149

Hey Peter,

I am attempting to add the HTTP Header for PDF Files.  I really feel that this can be a bonus for sites that do have duplicated PDF content, especially on large e-commerce based sites.

I figured that they(Bing) didnt support it, and it sounds like it is probably not considered in the form of an HTTP Header

I may have to consider conditional logic and/or create a dynamic robots.txt file to disallow these PDF files for all other search engines, while serving up canonical HTTP Headers for Google, assuming that Bing doesnt support it.

It would be good to try and test, I may just end up doing that

I think you guys are confused.  There is a difference between the rel="canonical" HTTP header, and a rel="canonical" tag.

I understand their stance with regards to the tag, but wonder if they even consider the canonical in the form of an HTTP Header.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html

anyone know^