Just realized that due to a sealing mistake when we were creating few of our subdomains, we were in fact creating duplicate content. See examples here:
site:faq.testcountry.com - Google Search
the results that has the ?cat=, ? products.html?, products.html? details.html are all there because there was a linking problem in the menu structure of subdomains that send the java script links to go to database driven pages in fact creating duplicate content like:
Home Drug Test Kits, Urine, Hair, Saliva, HIV, Ovulation, Diabetes - TestCountry
faq.testcountry.com/details.html?cat=121 (NOW Giving 404 since we fixed it but was giving the same content as the first link)
http://faq.testcountry.com/products.html?cat=121 (NOW Giving 404 since we fixed it but was giving the same content as the first link)
There were literally hundreds of cases like this. Also not only in this subdomain but on our other mode/rewrite subdomain that we created here
Mold Tests - Health Hazardst - Mold Testing Kit
vs..
testingkits.testcountry.com/products.html?product=1211
The sole reason we wanted to do a sitemap based mode/rewrite was the assumption that robots can not read javascript and our dynamic database driven product and category pages. Now we see that we were not correct.
This duplicate content issue is causing declines in SERPs, that is pretty obvious since the site receives almost the same organic traffic from MSN or ASK as Google.
What to do next, you think?
-we are going to seal all our subdomain links, and then give 404 errors to duplicate subdomain pages
-Ask for reinclusion with webmastertools on Google (Do we need to since w are already included it is just we are penalied for duplicate content)