I have recently purchased an auto blog that is several years old with a large amount of duplicate content on it. I mainly bought it for the good .com domain name and now have a staff creating good quality original content for the site. My question is, should I remove all the old posts which are all duplicate content or should I leave them on the site and just keep adding new content? One of the problems is that there is a decent number of backlinks going to the old duplicate content posts, and I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle this as far as SEO goes. Get rid of the duplicate posts and have the backlinks go now where? Keep the dup posts and backlinks and risk a Google seo penalty? Or possibly set up 301 redirects for the removed posts which had backlinks? Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.
I think you should not remove any stuff which is already there on the website. BTW what is the PR of the site. I am sure if you have bought it for good .com domain name, it's PR must also be good. Because all the old backlinks are connected to the old content so better to keep as if as. And start with a good and quality content with proper bookmarking
i will go with that say do not remove any old posts and start to build and post new unique articles and content it will get back to the ranking and if the pr is hi it will be faster than you think or imagine good luck
I'd also recommend leaving the duplicate content where it is especially since you have backlinks to these pages.
It really depends on what you want to do with it. If the duplicate content will be of any value to your visitors than you might consider leaving some of the content. But if you don't need it, then just get rid of the content and create your own unique content and use 301 redirect so all the deep links will still pass the value.
Thank you all so much for some great advice. I think I will be leaving most of the old content and just remove certain posts that bring no value to the site. Best regards,