Duplicate Content- New Content

[factoring]

I started my site back in November of 2006. I am building my backlinks and am learning SEO. I had one page which I really want to rank well. None of the search engines indexed that particular page.

That page had duplicate content.

It was a summary of the three other smaller pages that linked to it.

I recently deleted all of the duplicate content pages and summarized part of the information in this new page. It has been about two weeks.

Will google eventually index this page?

My theory is that once the search engines stop indexing the three smaller less content pages because they are 404's now, they will index the larger page.

Is this theory correct?

Thank you.

[NothingButNet]

There might be other reasons than duplicate content. I cannot give you any advice if I don't see the page. Jill Whalen says there is no such thing as duplicate content penalty. He he... Read her article, it's quite interesting.

[Ender]

Yes your theory's correct, but the problem with duplicate pages is that Google throttle back their crawling rate to save resources. That means if you have a lot of duplicate pages Google can be really slow to update and remove them. I have pages on one site that haven't been crawled since January.

I think it might speed things up if you add the url to your robots.txt file. That gets crawled much more often.

Cheers,
Ender.

[factoring]

I 404'ld the old duplicated pages. Should that do the trick? I am not sure how to make a robots.txt file. I will have to do some research. Thank you for your responses.

[Ender]

It depends on the 404 actually. Some are actually 302 redirects to a "404 like" but you can test this using an online server response header against a dummy url.

The robots.txt removal would probably work more quickly because it's spidered more frequently. You just need to create a simple text file with notepad (don't use Word) with something like;
User-Agent: *
disallow: /foldername/yourfile.html

and upload that to the root folder of your site eg where you keep your main index.htm (say) file. If it's a dynamic url it's more problematic.

Cheers,
Ender.

[I-Got-IT!]

You can always edit your 404 file and make it redirect back to your main page.

[factoring]

Would it solve my problem if I make each individual page again and put this in the meta tag?

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">

Thank you for your replies.

[EWSitesCom]

duplicate content is bad.

[colorexpertsbd]

Originally Posted by factoring

Will google eventually index this page?

Pease don't wait for Google to index your page. Just keep on posting your link to other websites that are listed in Google. There are many pages that will allow you to add links. Or you can go for free directories.

Another way to get listed is to start blogging. Blogs get indexed easily. Keep the blog with many links to your site.

[factoring]

Most of my other pages are indexed in google. This one particular page is not getting indexed because of old duplicate content.

Side note----I started a blog on my site.

[Janna122003]

Just put the links in your forum sig for fastest indexing.