Duplicate content in 'White Label Shop' sub domain. How do I avoid a Google penalty?

Hi all,

I'd really appreciate some input on this one.

We're about to partner with a well known price comparison site in the UK: beatthatquote.com (recently acquired by Google).

BeatThatQuote will be providing a 'white label' insurance site that'll be linked from our main website. The white label will be branded with our logo, headers & footers. The idea here is to create a seemless transition from the vistor landing on our website to entering the white label shop.

Here's my question.

Most affiliates of BeatThatQuote create a sub-domain where the white label shop is located.

For example, assuming my website is called GreatDealsOnline.com, the white label shop would be hosted on:

Shop.GreatDealsOnline.com

The problem I have with this is that BeatThatQuote run these white label websites for 1,000s of affiliates in the UK, and the content within the white label shop is EXACTLY the same on each site.

So, when Google indexes Shop.GreatDealsOnline.com and finds the same content that's already been posted elsewhere online (hundreds of times over) , I'm assuming it'll penalise the main site GreatDealsOnline.com accordingly.

Assuming this is the case, I guess I'll need to BLOCK the Google bot from crawling the sub domain (with 100% duplicate content) but how exactly do I do this?


Can someone please tell me exactly what I need to include on the robots.txt file on both the main site and the sub domain to ensure this is setup correctly?

If there's a best practice approach to this i'd be keen to know. Ideally, although I want to block the search bots from crawling the sub domain - with 100% duplicate content - I still want Google to know that users are effectively still 'on site' so the bounce rate for the website as a whole (main site and sub domain) remains low.

Any thoughts, advice would be gratefully appreciated

Cheers
Martin