Bought a site with duplicate content, how to sort it out.

The safest way

[Aberdeen]

My client has just bought a website with lots of good content, but it turns out that the previous owner had two sites running the same content. All the traffic comes in through site A, but the client wants to use site B because it has a far better domain name.

As far as I can tell site A and B are exactly the same, and site B is the one that has been stung by the duplicate content filter.

What is the best way to approach this? Put 301 redirect on all site A pages pointing them to site B pages. Or just delete site A completely and let google sort it out itself. Traffic is not important for the next couple of months.

Any advice?

[Brett_Tabke]

301 redirect and leave it alone.

[AnonyMouse]

Note of caution - if you have lots of links to Site A, resulting in good rankings, do *not* change those links to point at your new site. They will be seen by Google as "new" links, and your site will disappear from the rankings...