Hi to all I forgot a link on the website and google followed it and ALREADY INDEXED 20000 pages (all duplicate). I got penalized and want to redirect all of them with 301 to homepage (SO THAT i CAN DE-INDEX THEM). It is risky for google? Will google rise a red flag if so many redirects? All the pages are within the same site AND MOSTLY DUPLICATE. I don't want to use robots.txt because I don't want the pages to appear in webmaster tools as crawling errors. UPDATE: I think is better to create a blank page with noindex and nofollow tags on head and to 301 redirect to it ? Thank you!
Manually creating that many 301 redirects in your .htaccess file won't be fun. However, do you expect visitors to view the 20,000 webpages? If you do, the answer is not 301 redirects. Your best bet is to use a robots.txt file with instructions telling the search engines to stay out of those files. Johnny Mazuma