Hi all,
I'm dealing with a series of sites containing a large amount of content (about 350,000 articles total).

In order to properly categorize these articles, many of them live in several places (eg. http://mysite.com/magazine/articlename.htm and http://mysite.com/televisions/articlename.htm )

In order to avoid multiple listings in search engines for the same article, we currently drop a noindex tag into all versions of the article we decide are "secondary", and let the engines find the "primary" version of the article on their own.

The problem is, many of these articles (some of which are now 5 or 6 years old) were assigned a generic primary category, which we'd now like to change.

If we change the primary category at this point (note: we wouldn't be removing any versions of the story, just changing primary categorization), the noindex will be added to the version of the article engines have already indexed, so the article would (I'm assuming) be dropped entirely, and we'd have to wait and hope the new primary version of the article would be re-indexed quickly. Additionally, any bump in placement we received from external linkage, etc would be lost.

Has anyone dealt with similar issues? Is there any way to tell an engine landing on an article "please don't index this version of the article, instead index THIS version" (with a link to new primary URL)?

Any advice would be sincerely appreciated!

thanks,
Dan

*Is there any way to tell an engine landing on an article "please don't index this version of the article, instead index THIS version" (with a link to new primary URL)?*

You could/should 301 all secondary article Urls to one new primary one, AFAIK.

I agree. There is really no point in having multiple versions of the same article. especially if you have noindex on all secondary versions. Whats the point in them being there?

thanks guys... I really appreciate the responses.

There unfortunately is a reason why blanket 301s won't work, from an advertising perspective. Here's why:

Imagine an article about a Panasonic HD Plasma TV review. It gets tagged as "hd video" and "plasma tv", and we decide to make "plasma tv" the primary category.

Now, a link to that article appears in the "hd video" category, and panasonic decides it wants to sponsor that category. So, we've got Panasonic banners flying all over the link to the review. Except, when you click the review, it 301s to the primary category, "plasma tv", which has already been sponsored by Sony. We're going to have unhappy Panasonic folks on our hands.

I think 301s may be *part* of our solution, though. Again, I appreciate the help.