Which is better? Remove folder or fix the links and wait?

[Silviu]

Dear Mozers,

Recently I added a new language to one of my sites in a new folder (www.site.com/es/) but for some reasons many links got broken or were simply sending to a  wrong page. This caused a bad indexing and it also showed a lot of duplicate content.

I know how to fix it but my question is this: Is it better to remove the second language folder, fix it and then put it back up after a few months or just fix it now as it is and wait for G to come back and index the new links?

[Getz.pro]

Fix it now. If not, you will have a bunch of 404s which is not good either.

[Silviu]

Thanks for the input.

I was thinking about removing the folder by blocking the pages from robots txt. In the meantime I can  fix the all the errors and once that's done I'll have everything back up.

My main concern is that if I do that now even more duplicate content will show :). Would it be better if I allow the search engines some time to de-index these pages and come back with the fixed verion afterwards?

[Getz.pro]

I would just fix the links and allow the SEs to reindex as they crawl the site. Just put all your effort to this and get it down today and you won't have to worry about taking content down.

[Silviu]

Thx for the advice. Will do!