So we are working on a new site for someone, and their old site has copious amounts of duplicate content. They actually seem to fair alright on various search terms. The question I have is, now we are redoing their website, everything is structured very nicely and has no duplicate content. This is obviously good as we have solved the problems of the previous site Now I know deleting content / pages from the site is considered to be bad, but when we launch the new site will google (and other search engines) look at the site, see a bunch of pages that no longer exist and give penalties accordingly even though we are fixing a problem based on duplicate content? Will we need to 301 redirect all of the duplicate pages to their own consolidated new version? Or will it be ok and search engines will work out whats happened? I have a feeling that google only ranks one of the duplicate pages and doesnt rank the rest, but better to be safe Cheers in advance
Simply do a 301 permanent redirection from the duplicate pages to the new canonical one. Duplicate pages dilutes the relevancy and the chances of the said page to rank higher in the SERPs.
i wouldgo for 301 redirects for every page... it would be a waste if you didnt and all your hard work wont be indexed