: My 2nd level domain has a non-deletable 3rd level domain mirror. Will Google penalize it for this? I bought an example.org domain and created an account on a free web host. When signing up,

@Ogunnowo487

May this lead to Google penalizing my 2nd level domain for content duplication?


Just to clarify, there is no "penalty" as such for duplicate content, it's just that your ranking will be divided between the two domains if both are returned in the SERPs. Not only could this reduce the ranking for your primary domain, the 3rd level domain could even rank higher and result in confusion for your users.

However, Google is pretty good at deciding for itself which is the canonical domain so the above scenario may not cause you much of a problem. But you can bet that Google will find the 3rd level domain and this will be searchable.

So, steps should be taken to avoid the duplicate content and to avoid the 3rd level domain being indexed:


If you can, you should set up a 301 redirect from the 3rd level domain to your primary domain. eg. Using .htaccess on Apache. However, this might not be possible on your "free" host. As a fallback, you could perhaps implement a JavaScript redirect instead.
Use a rel="canonical" element in the head section of your HTML document that points to the primary domain.
Use absolute URLs/links throughout your site. Or, root-relative URLs and a base element in the head section that points to the primary domain.




Also note that there can be other issues with free hosts/subdomains. For example:


Free subdomain not indexed

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