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I think that there is a slightly bigger question here. Rather than "How can I stop Moz flagging these up as duplicate?" you might want to ask "Are these duplicate pages harming me". Thin pages, particularly those ranking on desirable terms, are something I try hard to avoid.  They send pretty poor quality signals to Google and create poor user experience signals as well.  If there is a term that I want to rank for I would ensure that pages are strong enough to deserve ranking before letting them get indexed. It can be painful to deindex a page that ranks. However if those pages are giving off bad signals that could be your best chance of long term ranking success. A compromise might be to fill them out in the mean time.  How effective this might be will really depend on your niche and your website.  Lots of stores do this by just adding a load of low value text to the page, but a better approach is to try to put something useful there until the products arrive.  Do this right and you could even be building links into those pages before the products arrive. One example of this that I have done in the past is to build out a great coming soon page that featured a competition to win the item when it launched,  As well as ensuring that there was a page worthy of ranking (particularly against the competition who were using stub pages!), it brought some other key advantages: The competition was used to build links from related sites User experience was great. People hung about, watched the video and filled in the entry form It got shared (bonus prize draw entries for sharing!) When the product hit the shelves we already had a mailing list of interested customers That's fairly involved, so won't work for everything, but the principals are sound.  If you were Google which would you want to rank? That or an empty page?

Hello benseb, You mention that you have de-prioritized past events in the sitemap. You could go the nofollow route although this is a somewhat clumsy way to go about it. I think based on what you have described, your best bet is to leave it as is (after moving forward with the hint Matt Cutts dropped) rather than eliminating a load of content which is sending Google positive signals. My guess is that these positive signals overpower any negative signals that might be resulting from aging content. If everything has been properly indexed and current events are showing up, I wouldn't make any big alterations - why mess with a good thing? If you begin seeing drastic declines in traffic or user interaction, that might be the time to take a harder stance. For now though, let it be. Best of luck! Rob

Hello benseb, From what I'm understanding, your best bet is to 301 to the new page (assuming it provides quality content). Even though you may lose some "link juice" in the process, it is still a better option than risking poor url structure and link equity. Even producing some mildly relevant content would help you out in this case - using the same old, tired content and making the 301 simply for Google's sake might not be the best strategy, but if you can freshen it up and 301 correctly that would be optimal. Best of luck, Rob

SamuelScott is 100% right, I only wanted to add, that we should stop thinking about the anchor. It is allways manipulation in the room, when we think about anchor. Thats my opinion.