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Dear MozPeople,

I am just working on rebuilding a structure of the "news" website. For some reasons, we need to keep syndicated content on the site. But at the same time, we would like to apply for google news again (we have been accepted in the past but got kicked out because of the duplicate content). So I am facing the challenge of separating the Original content from Syndicated as requested by google. But I am not sure which one is better:

*A) Put all syndicated content into "/syndicated/" and then Disallow /syndicated/ in robots.txt and set NOINDEX meta on every page. **But in this case, I am not sure, what will happen if we will link to these articles from the other parts of the  website. We will waste our link juice, right? Also, google will not crawl these pages, so he will not know about no indexing. Is this OK for google and google news?

**B) NOINDEX meta on every page. **Google will crawl these pages, but will not show them in the results. We will  still loose our link juice from links pointing to these pages, right?

So ... is there any difference? And we should try to put "nofollow" attribute to all the links pointing to the syndicated pages, right? Is there anything else important?

This is the first time I am making this kind of "hack" so I am exactly sure what to do and how to proceed.

Thank you!

1. it has been almost a year now from the massive hit. after that, there were also some smaller hits

2. we are putting effort into improvements. that is quite frustrating for me, because I believe that our effort is demolished by old duplicated content (that creates 80% of the website :-))

Yeah, we will need to take care about the link-mess... 
Thank you!

Yeah, this strategy will be definitely part of the guidelines for the editors.

One last question: do you know some good resources I can use as an inspiration?

Thank you so much..

Yeah, paying ... we actually pay for this content (earlier management decisions :-))

EGOL your insights are very appreciated :-)!

I agree with you. Makes total sense.

So you didn't experience any problems removing outdated  content (or "content with no traffic value") from your website? You have set 410 for those pages and remove all internal links to them and google was ok with that?

Redirecting useless content - you mean set 301 to the most relevant page that is bringing traffic?

Thank you sir

HI Dimitrii,

thank you very much for your opinion. The idea of canonical links is very interesting. We may try that in the "first" phase. But I still miss the point of paying for the content that is not accessible from SE.

Is my understanding right, that if I would set canonical for these duplicates, Google has no reason to show this pages in the SERP?

Hi everyone,

I am taking care of the large "news" website (500k pages), which got massive hit from Panda because of the duplicated content (70% was syndicated content). I recommended that all syndicated content should be removed and the website should focus on original, high quallity content.

However, this was implemented only partially. All syndicated content is set to NOINDEX (they thing that it is good for user to see standard news + original HQ content). Of course it didn't help at all. No change after months. If I would be Google, I would definitely penalize website that has 80% of the content set to NOINDEX a it is duplicated. I would consider this site "cheating" and not worthy for the user.

What do you think about this "theory"? What would you do?

Thank you for your help!