How to hide our duplicate pages from SERP? Best practice to increase visibility to new pages?

[vtmoz]

Hi all,

We have total 4 pages about same topic and similar keywords. These pages are from our main domain and sub domains too. As the pages from sub domains are years old and been receiving visits from SERP, they stick to 1st position. But we have recently created new pages on our main domain which we are expecting to rank on 1st position. I am planning to hide the sub domain pages from SERP using "Remove URLs" for some days to increase visibility to new pages from main domain. Is this the right and best practice to proceed with?

Thanks

[seoman10]

To clarify, it is unlikely that removing an old page will make the new one show!

Unless it is a spamy page or low quality, I would be slow to remove it.

If it's been around for awhile and the page has some sort of value it probably has some page authority.

You could consider keeping the page content within context but updating it.

Alternatively you could 301 redirect the old page to a relevant new page.

Finally if the page has no value whatsoever or it's doing you harm, just delete the page.

[ThompsonPaul]

You absolutely do not want to use the remove URL tool in Search Console!!

Since those old subdomain pages have been ranking and earning traffic and authority in the SERPs, it would be a huge mistake to just throw that all away.

Instead, you must use 301-redirects to point those old page URLs to the new page you've created on the main site that you now wish to earn that traffic. The authority and ranking power of the old pages will transfer to the new ones. It's like being told you can choose to start the race from the starting line, or you can be given a 25-yard head start with a tailwind.

Take the head start - redirect the old pages. A side effect of the 301 redirects is that after a period of time, the search engines will stop indexing the old pages, so they'll drop out of the SERPs eventually.

Hope that helps?

Paul