Impact on site’s ranking by removing /directory/ and its pages

[austinwells]

Hi All.....

I am working on a huge portal having more than 6 sections as well so many dynamic generated content pages. Review section is one of them.

This section contain 46 manufacturers, all their products and reviews for each type. We are getting these reviews from one big review provider. We want to remove this section and all its pages as we came to know that the same content has been provided to more than 50 sites who is working on same concept on which we are working.

This is the site for which we are working hard but facing problems in getting better rankings. I think this duplicate content may be creating a problem for us. May be Google filtering our site pages. Is it possible?

And this is why I have decided to de-index /review/ section and so that all pages from this directory got de-index. I will use Google webmaster tool to remove /review/ section choosing remove directory from Google index to remove its pages.

My question de-indexing pages in large quantity at once from such a big site does affect my current rankings of other sections and its pages?

does remove this directory and its pages will affect adversely on ranking of other pages of same site?

Thanks in advance for any recommendation.

[edited by: tedster at 6:00 pm (utc) on May 31, 2010]
[edit reason] removed some specifics [/edit]

[tedster]

If you remove the pages from Google's index, then any internal linking from those pages to the rest of your site will not be taken into account. So I'd say make sure your other ranking pages still have a good link structure before doing any "removal". Perhaps a better approach would be a noindex,follow robots meta-tag.

[austinwells]

Hi Tedster,

It would be the same either I remove pages/directory from Google Webmaster Tool OR I used noindex,nofollow robots tag.

with both i am gonna loose all self links from those page which are currently there. So I am worried about those links and their impact. Currently they must be having their weightage in current ranking or may not be. I am not sure about it, that is why i am asking you the same here. Would it be have adverse effect on my current rankings.

Please advice

[Robert Charlton]

noindex,nofollow and noindex,follow behave very differently.

Note that noindex,follow pages can accumulate and transmit PageRank. This has been confirmed by Google.

Funny coincidence... I just posted in the Updates thread about unique content that I insisted to several of my clients that they "contractually specify to resellers that their web copy had to be different"... and I had the clients go so far as to create a different set of content for the resellers.

I agree with tedster that you should be very cautious... downright reluctant, in fact... to remove an entire directory of good material.