Duplicate Content - Delete it or NoIndex?

[sbrault74]

Last month I realized that one of my freelancers had been feeding my website with copied / spun content and sadly, there's lots of it. And of course it got my website to be hit hard by the last Panda update.

Now that I've identified the content, what the best thing to do? Should I delete it permanently and get 404 errors or should I set the pages' robot meta tag to "nofollow"?

[sbrault74]

... or should I pay someone to rewrite everything?

[ske11]

Hi

It depends on the quality of the content and why it is on your site, if it were written properly would it add genuine value to your readers? Or was it designed as filler content because you were told you needed more pages on your website?

You need to be honest with yourself on this point and one way to think about it is would you pay to have this content on your site if there were no SEO value to you, does it help build trust in your brand?.

If the answer is it was just filler then remove it and use a 301 redirect to the most appropriate proper content on your site.

If the content was meant to add genuine value then use a no index tag on it until that content has been corrected, then remove the no index and let Google know it is available to index,

I hope this helps

Sean

[sbrault74]

All the duplicated content is news posts so they lose value quickly. The only reason to keep it is volume since there's over 300 duplicated posts (about 25% of my overall content).

Lots of them have partially copied content from press releases.