Is it possible to deindex old URLs that contain duplicate content?

[ClickHub-Harry]

Our client is a recruitment agency and their website used to contain a substantial amount of duplicate content as many of the listed job descriptions were repeated and recycled. As a result, their rankings rarely progress beyond page 2 on Google. Although they have started using more unique content for each listing, it appears that old job listings pages are still indexed so our assumption is that Google is holding down the ranking due to the amount of duplicate content present (one software returned a score of 43% duplicate content across the website).

Looking at other recruitment websites, it appears that they block the actual job listings via the robots.txt file.

Would blocking the job listings page from being indexed either by robots.txt or by a noindex tag reduce the negative impact of the duplicate content, but also remove any link juice coming to those pages?

In addition, expired job listing URLs stay live which is likely to be increasing the overall duplicate content. Would it be worth removing these pages and setting up 404s, given that any links to these pages would be lost? If these pages are removed, is it possible to permanently deindex these URLs?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

[Bigb06]

Hello,

If you want to speed up the process of deindexing, after setup all noindex tags you could upload a sitemap in GSC with all URLs you want to be crawled again.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I would definitely make sure that the pages that are expired will indeed return a 404.

In addition, what you could do as well for the duplicate content pages is use a canonical tag to point back to the original page. Wouldn't that work for you?

[ClickHub-Harry]

Hi Martijn,

Thank you for responding. I think canonical tags are the best way forward, I am looking forward to explain to the web developer that we need several hundred tags implementing!

Many thanks

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

HI Harry, He should be able to set this up dynamically. Otherwise, yes I do feel sorry for him but then he didn't he didn't built it right the first time anyway. Martijn.