Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I have two pages that Google has indexed. One (page 1) has lots of incoming links and is in my Google XML sitemap.
The other (page 2) has few incoming links and is not in my Google XML sitemap.
The pages have identical content and similar URLs and for some reason Google is preffering to show Page 2 in the SERPs rather than page 1.
I know I should have avoided this in the first place by not placing up duplicate content under different URLs and that I should probably 301 redirect page 2 to page 1, but I have a plan to try something different and I'd like opinions on whether it will have any effect and whether it will endanger my rankings.
The plan is to also add the URL of page 2 into the Google sitemap and then to set the priority of page 1 to 1.0 (the highest) and the priority of page 2 to 0.1 (or 0.0?).
What does everyone think? Will this work or not, and will it endanger my rankings. Could both pages not rank after doing this?
Thanks in advance.
It's extremely unlikely to get both duplicate pages to rank - and an xml sitemap is only a suggestion to Google, not anything they are required to do. I'd say just go with the 301 and move on.
