Q&A Forum Duplicate Pages Issue

[Guest]

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[James77]

Firstly I would try and provide a method of prevention to this happening in future, as if the question has been asked before it is also likely to have been answered before. Therefore it would make sense to provide the past answers to the same question.

My suggestion would be to try and move the old answers onto a single question, and then 301 all the old duplicate questions onto that single question.

[GPainter]

Another option is to have the Q&A hidden behind a robots and then move most common Q&A outside of that so the robots can crawl it. This way you avoid duplicate content as the robots cant crawl it but they can crawl the most relevant/used Q&A for users to find.

Matt Cutts has mentioned that duplicate content unless spammy is not going to penalize you site that much so don't panic too much.  He said twice in his video here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi-wkEeOKxM

So as mentioned looked into a preventive measure maybe have it behind a log in so robots can't access it.

Hope something in there helps. good luck.

[Dr-Pete]

Given the scope, and if 100K are actually indexed, I think I'd use rel=canonical here. Both approaches work and, typically, we'd recommend 301s, but setting up 100K 301s in one shot can potentially look suspicious to Google. It's not a huge risk, but I've seen odd problems from time to time. Rel=canonical might be a bit safer. Of course, this depends a lot on what Google has actually indexed and how the crawl structure and URLs are set up.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

I can only imagine what a task sorting a good 301 structure would be. I am with Dr. Pete here and go for the canonical solution and then try to figure out a way to avoid this for future questions.

Just remember that rel=canonical is only a suggestion to Google, and although they take notice most of the time, they can still ignore it.

-Andy