Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
It's your cms causing the problem. duplicate page titles are very different to duplicate H1's which would be regarded as duplicate content.
I suggest you go into your cms and get rid of the dupe titles, remove cache pages, and google fetch them all, in GWT's.
It depends if Google had index these 'empty' pages. You need to check. Remember that every page is also give page authority. Best to redirect them before removing them as best practice. You can get Google to fetch the pages in GWTs so that the crawlers follow the redirect. Then remove them.
Your old pages - fetch them in GWT's, then remove them if you already have the 301's set up. Once google has indexed the new pages, you know the link juice has passed and can remove.
The blocking is used as a back up.
Great work, I don't think you're so lucky, perhaps a bit but it appears you did what was necessary to clear your link profile many would shy from as it's laborious and difficult. But not impossible.
Excellent feedback from you, so many thanks. I've gotta go through the process for a client very shortly.
How long did it take you to do this?
How many RR's did you submit as well?
To manage old pages it's best practice to simply 301 redirect them, leave them for a couple of weeks then tag them with no follow and/or block them with robots. That way you've passed on the link equity. Then you can remove them from GWT's.
In answer to 1. yes But not all SE's read the "*" wildcard in file names. You might need to tinker with this a bit.
Use this to help:http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml
I'd agree. I've never known this or heard of this to be "dangerous". In fact, in terms of on-page optimisation, your target keywords should be included in both the title and the H1 tags.
I'd say it's dangerous if you have multiple pages with the same title and H1 tags. Then the pages could be seen as duplicates and might not be indexed.
It depends if Google had index these 'empty' pages. You need to check. Remember that every page is also give page authority. Best to redirect them before removing them as best practice. You can get Google to fetch the pages in GWTs so that the crawlers follow the redirect. Then remove them.
Your old pages - fetch them in GWT's, then remove them if you already have the 301's set up. Once google has indexed the new pages, you know the link juice has passed and can remove.
The blocking is used as a back up.