Subdomains - Desperate

Our site (www.mydomain.com) has been established and ranking well for a wide number of keywords for a number of years. We have agreements with 4 sites, who are also authoritative but not owned by us. These sites have sub domains that point to our website.

• subdomain1.ourdomain.com
• Subdomain2.ourdomain.com
• Subdomain3.ourdomain.com
• Subdomain4.ourdomain.com

Problem 1
The problem is that the Google bots have crawled each of the sub domains e.g. subdomain1.ourdomain.com, followed the links and indexed a large proportion of our site under their sub domain.

For example, we have a page (http://www.ourdomain.com/blue-cars). In addition to our page, Google has also indexed (http://www.subdomain1.ourdomain/blue-cars /). This page is the exact same content as our page and both are showing in serps. This is obviously a Duplicate content issue.

Problem 2
If I do a search on blue cars + mydomain in Google our sub domain page will display and not us. Has Google established that sub.example.com is the originator of the content and us the duplicator?

Problem 3
Currently this issue is only displaying in serps and not in Google webmaster tools.

Will a 301 resolve this issue. How will this affect our subdomain rankings.

Thank you in advance

Apart from the titles, is there any more duplicate content on the subdomains?

Yes - some of the pages , but very few are identical content.

Mostly they are all different pages (various brochure pages)

But in Google webmaster tools they are not showing up as duplicate content - is that because they are subdomains?

Good question... I am under the opinion that subdomains are essentially treated as completely different domains... However, I also believe there is a "quality weight" of some type that does look at the number and diversity of subdomains under a specific domain to attempt to combat spam...

Those are just my observations, hope they help with your issue. I agree with above - watch out for duplicate content between the subdomains as they might trigger a lower weight (thus lower SERP).