Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
www.domain.com/other-articles/ (it has 100 pages in this directory) and
www.domain.com/other-articles2/ (it has also 100 pages)
Those 200 pages are articles from article directories. Since they came from article directories, they are duplicate contents right? I noticed that my PageRank dropped from 4 to 3 since adding those contents.
My website has 300 pages in total. 100 pages are unique and 200 are not. Can I delete those 200 pages at once without alarming Google or other search engines? I already deleted all the links that links to those 200 pages in my domain www.domain.com. But I left the 200 pages and the two directories intact.
Please advise what to do to delete them?
You mean I should use 301 redirect? Why? I don't need those article pages (duplicate contents), that's why I wanted to delete them, but I don't know the right way.
where are the duplicate contents you are trying to delete?
your server?
google's index?
a 301 means the content at this url is gone/deleted/moved/whatever and has been permanently moved to/replaced with the content at another url.
if you have duplicate content, you pick the "good url" and redirect all duplicates of that content to the good one.
if you are deleting contents and you don't care what happens when that url is requested, you send a 404 which means the requested content is not found so go away.
if you wish, you can put alternate content on your 404 page to allow navigation to your site from the error page.
But the duplicate contents (articles) is still in my server. I use a custom 404 error, so no problem with that. But is it really OK to delete 200 pages of them at once? Will it not alarm Google?
If I leave those duplicate contents (articles) although I already "removed all links to the articles from my website", will it still harm my main www.domain.com domain name?
The "X" means you already did it. When there is not a X in the [ ] then you should do it. When there are no more blank [ ] you are done and you don't have to do anything else.
But I am still wondering if is it OK to delete 200 pages at once. Won't it alarm Google and penalize my site (even though I'm going to use the Webmaster Tools)?
Removing them is so very unlikely to harm you more than the duplicate content already is, and 200 articles are a drop in the sea at google headquarters. Furthermore by removing them you're making a sign to google and with some time, any penalty given to you because of the duplicate content will probably also be neutralized.
Besides from that, read Googles Guidelines for Webmasters, they have some advice in general about what is considered "good" and what is considered "evil" to that cute little fluffy bot they have running crazy around the internet.
Sincerely, and have fun,
If for example, there's a duplicate content "page" inside www.domain.com (www.domain.com/duplicate.html), and it was indexed by Google, but there is no link from www.domain.com pointing to www.domain.com/duplicate.html, will it still penalize the root domain www.domain.com even there's no link pointing to the duplicate page?
