Simple duplicate content query

[SO_UK]

Hello Community,

One of my clients runs a job board website. They are having some new framework installed which will lead to them having to delete all their jobs and re-add them. The same jobs will be re-posted but with a different reference number which in turn with change each URL. I believe this will cause significant duplicate content issues, I just thought I would get a second opinion on best practice for approaching a situation like this.

Would a possible solution be to delete jobs gradually and 301 re-direct old URLs to new URLs?

Many thanks in advance,

Adam

[Hurf]

If the only change is to the URL (and job reference) and the content is otherwise the same, you'd definitely want to create 301s for these - this is exactly what 301s are for, after all.  The 301s should, now, pass on 100percent of the pagerank. There are caveats (PR is not the only ranking signal), see here: <a>https://moz.com/blog/301-redirection-rules-for-seo</a>

Also,  think of the user experience,  If I've bookmarked a job I'd expect to click the link and find it.

A thought: If the new system could append the job number with a fixed value, creating a pattern match redirect rule could make easy work of this for them.

Then, with your 301s in place (and confirmed to be in good order - you can run a crawl test: <a>https://moz.com/researchtools/crawl-test</a>, you can remove your old listings.

Sorry for the multiple revisions of this answer, Adam; I was in the bath when I started writing it!