News site and duplicate/cannibalism/old

[HashtagHustler]

Hey everybody. I am working with a handful of medical news websites and some of these sites are rather large. I am noticing/suspecting there is some cannibalism going on here. How do news sites deal with this? Do they noindex the old stuff? Update the old stuff instead of writing a new piece all together? Curious what to do!

[Colemckeon]

No index wouldn't be the best practice, especially if there are links pointing to that page. I would 301 redirect them or let them 404 off. 404 isn't always a bad thing. Its quite useful for getting rid of poor preforming content and unwanted material.

You could always combine the old with the new and just 301 re-direct the old URL

Hope this helps