General SEO/Keywords Help

[burrows14]

Hi everybody! I've consulted these boards many times in the past, and thank you all for creating such a great community.

I started my site in April 09 and have been struggling with traffic/SERPS for a while now. A few issues I've seen is I have much dupe content from an affiliate. I have somewhere around 500 of 28,000 pages indexed by G (a lot of pages for a site in its infancy, i know). I've updated my meta tags but seem to be still struggling. Do you think it is the duplicate content that is holding me back? If so, what would be the best remedy for this? No-crawl tags? Take them out? Any help would be greatly appreciated, thank you very much!

Shawn

[edited by: encyclo at 6:43 pm (utc) on Aug. 6, 2009]
[edit reason] no links to personal sites please [/edit]

[canadafred]

As far as duplicate content is concerned, I think the search engine will determine what content is more authentic; is the original content and then value each instance accordingly. If the authentic content was given birth on your 28,000 page baby then it stands to reason that your webpage seeds will blossom, someday.

Now, the search engine can be confused about who came first and could very easily reward the duplicate content moreso than the original content; a common situation results from today's world of instant replicating monstrocities (RSS being a popular culprit). Should content originality validating chaos be your demise and should removing the redundant content be an easy for you to accomplish then it would probably be wise to simply scrap the mischievious content.