Duplicate content: What now?

How can I minimize the damage?

[hallooo]

I changed the URL of 20 pages before the last deep crawl. I set NOINDEX,FOLLOW on the old Pages. Moreover all old Pages have a link to the new page.

As I can see at google-ex, Google dislikes this. Google killed 3 Pages, in 7 cases he is still using the old URL and in 10 cases he is using already the new URL.

In my first panic I deleted all old URLs.

How can I minimize the damage? One of the killed Pages is very important!

1.) Accept the 404. Maybe the 404 helps Google to find out quicker that the duplicate content doesn’t exist any longer.
2.) Use a 301 redirect.

Please Help!

[Brett_Tabke]

At this point - wash your hands of the old urls and generate 404's or metarefreshes to the new pages. Put the new pages in place and wait a month for it to update. It's a short term problem. A 301 will work short term, but it may create a long term issue.