Removing Dynamic URLS - Duplicate Content

Removing OLD Dyanamically generated urls

[kosmosweb]

We've got a Forum and after optimizing it to generate static pages we now have found that Google has indexed both our old posts and our new ones, thus indexing duplicate content and penalizing our site. Is there a way to remove this dynamically generated content with an HTACCESS file or other? We've tried the Robot.txt file but will Google actually remove pages that are still live?

For example; our old posts on the forum looked like:

ourdomain.com/forum/post-294.html

Now they are: ourdomain.com/forum/web-topic-437.html

And both pages are coming up with the exact content from our PHPBB Forum.

I need to get rid of all instances of /post* from Googles index for good, we have over 300+ duplicate entries and they need to be removed somehow. Googles Removal tool will also only work if a 404 error is occurring for each page and we have no idea how PHPBB is continually able to post both links as live.

All sugestions would greatly be apreciated!

Thanks Alex

[Receptional Andy]

I would say robots.txt is the best solution to get the older pages dropped:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /forum/post

how PHPBB is continually able to post both links as live.

You probably have mod_rewrite rules in your htaccess file to rewrite both types of URL. You could remove the URLs for the old format, however if you use the robots method there should be no real need to remove them.

If you definitely wanted to create a 404 and use the removal tool, you would need to alter the mod_rewrite rule for the old URLs to deliver a 404 instead of directing to the appropriate page.

[kosmosweb]

Great thank you! I'm feeling that using our Robots.txt file more efficiently would be our best solution.