Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages

[robbowebbo]

The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site.

As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products).

My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this.

My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com

Robin

[RyanKent]

Hi Robin,

It is important to understand the difference between Penguin and Panda.

Penguin focuses solely on a single issue: manipulative links to your site. By far the most effective solution is to remove the bad links. Penguin does not care about whether your content is duplicated or any other aspect of your site's quality.

Panda is a different update which focuses on content quality. While it is possible your site has multiple issues, you have diagnosed your issue as Penguin and stated you experienced a major traffic drop in April 2012. If that drop was on or immediately after April 24th, and you have built manipulative links to the site, it is highly likely the issue is Penguin.

A quick review of your site's backlinks in Open Site Explorer shows a large number of links which Penguin is designed to penalize....directory links and other low quality links.

I hope this information is helpful.

[robbowebbo]

Thanks for your reply Ryan. I am going to war on the bad links and have got over half of them removed already. There are one or two quite shocking examples of the manipulative linking you describe, and when I dug deeper into those sites I was utterly appalled.