Too many 301s?

[pauledwards]

Hi there, If there is a website that has accidently generated say 1,000 pages of duplicate content, would the seo be hurt if all those pages were re-directed to the origional source of the content?

There are no plans to re-write the 1,000 duplicate pages, they are already cached and indexed by Google.

I thought about canonical tags but as they have some traffic and a little seo value i thought 301 re-direct would be more appropiate to the relevant pages?

I am also right in thinking you would be able to remove the 301 in the .htaccess file once the index has updated?

Also once removed the 301 - i could use those urls later from scratch if i wanted?

Any info much appreciated.

[mrlee]

That sounds weird! If you generated 1000s of pages automatically, and these are all duplicate content, why don't you remove them? Google will end up removing them from its cache as well after a short period!

[pauledwards]

Well they seem to be generating traffic.

In principal is what i intend on doing ok, will it hard the seo or be seen as ok do you know?

Many thanks,

[Highland]

I would 301 the pages and get them out of your site's index. Even if you canonical all of them Google will still have to index 1000 pages instead of 1. The 301 will transfer most of your rank to the new page and you'll improve your crawl budget.

Why take the 301s out? Just leave them in there in case there are links pointed to them.

[pauledwards]

Thanks highland.

[pauledwards]

Also last one, if i wanted to revive the 301s say in a year i would be allowed to and the pages would index again?

[AdiRste]

Yes but I wouldn't really recommend this.

[pauledwards]

Ok, i probably wont but in what istance would you not recommend this?

I understand pa and pr etc will be back to nothing but its the keyword url i might want to use from scratch

[AlanMosley]

I would see if they had links, and get rid of the rest, it may look to Bing that you are trying to be tricky. Its not natural

[AdiRste]

Bringing back URL's that you didn't want and then decide that you do want is pretty annoying to Google...

[pauledwards]

But you can do it, yes?

[AdiRste]

Ha, yes you can my friend.

[Thos003]

How are these pages generating traffic? Are they being found in the search engine?

The real question, do these pages have links to them?

There is little value to a 301 redirect if you are not moving link traffic in the direction you are pointing. If you are out ranking the original content, then perhaps a 301 could help. How well does the original content rank?

[firstconversion]

If they had links, I would 301 the pages with links. Everything else I would 404

[johnshearer]

Great insight Highland!!!