Handful of internal pages penguin penalized. 302 them or let them 404?
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We have a site that is for the most part doing great, but the internal pages that received too much link building received some penguin penalties (no warning in WMT) but it's fairly obvious.
Has anyone tried letting these pages 404 and just creating new URL's? Or 302 redirecting the old URL's to new ones?
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definitely let them 404 and create new URL and make them much better, don't use any of the same content.
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You can try to 301 redirect them elsewhere, but the filter will probably get passed along eventually as well.The surest bet is to 404 them but leave the content there (ie: deliver a 404 status code but still allow people to get to that page's content). This way your users can still see the content, especially those coming from outside links that you can't control. However, this is not very elegant. I think Matt Cutts should chime in on this one, but I doubt he is a paying subscriber
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