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Our company has two websites with about 8,000 duplicate articles between them. Yep, 8,000 articles were posted on both sites over the past few years. This is the definition of cross-domain duplicate content.

Plan A is to set all of the articles to "noindex,follow" on the site that we care less about (site B). We are not redirecting since we want to keep the content on that site for on-site traffic to discover. If we do set them to "noindex," my concern is that we'll lose massive amounts of link equity acquired over time...and thus lose domain authority...thus overall site rankability. Does Google treat pages changed to "noindex" the same as 404 pages? If so, then I imagine we would lose massive link equity.

Plan B is to just wait it out since we're migrating site B to site A in 6-9 months, and hope that our more important site (site A) doesn't get a Panda penalty in the meantime.

Thoughts on the better plan?

Yep, already implemented. Good point though.

Definitely. I start with the 30 day view, then go to YTD, then push the start date back to 1/1/2011. That's my 3 step process every time I'm investigating a situation.

I've seen at least 20 of our sites decline in traffic in the past few months due to the April & June Panda updates. The dates of decline in Webmaster Tools (Traffic > Search Queries) line up perfectly with the various recent Panda updates.

Fixing /tag/ issues is one thing...but we have a monumental task of rewriting massive amounts of product descriptions next. We also have a fair amount of "no-indexing" or canonicalizing to do with our syndicated content. We'll be better for it in the end. I only wish I knew about these situations much sooner.

As I tell everyone, protect your unique content with all you've got...and keep duplicate content nowhere near your site. It's just too risky.

Thank you both...and, we're thinking alike. I recently went through our 60+ Wordpress sites addressing the issue of non-indexed /tag/ pages and also ensuring they weren't in the sitemap via our Sitemap plugin.

For the sites that had hundreds or thousands of /tag/ pages, but very little traffic in Google Analytics (Search > Organic w/ Landing Page as "primary dimension")...I just went ahead and set them to "noindex").

For sites where the /tag/ pages were driving a fair amount of traffic (10% of site total or more), I had our editors write unique descriptions for the top 50-100 (like we do with category pages) and then we set the rest to "noindex,follow" via the meta robots tag.

For this one site...I just haven't found an easy solution that didn't leave an uneasy feeling in my stomach. It's tough to give up 25% of your traffic in hopes that Google will get it right and rank your real content higher in place of these /tag/ pages.

Uh oh...I just checked Analytics and or organic traffic started creeping down @ July 13th. When I look at just the /tag/ pages in the organic landing pages section, I see that they dropped in traffic @ 50-60%. Something bad is happening. I am setting them to "noindex" immediately.

Definitely can't wait to read your post. I'll be writing my own on www.kernmedia.com in the near future as well.

We have a Wordpress site where /tag/ pages were not set to "noindex" and they are driving 25% of site's traffic (roughly 100,000 visits year to date). We can't simply "noindex" them all now, or we'll lose a massive amount of traffic. We can't possibly write unique descriptions for all of them. We can't just do nothing or a Panda update will come by and ding us for duplicate content one day (surprised it hasn't already). What would you do?