Resolving a Duplicate Page Problem

[phpmaven]

Hi All,

I had a product page that ranked well for a particular search and unfortunately because of my own stupidity I was displaying the same product in a "Popular Products" section of my site with a different page name but the same text and image. Well of course you know what happened; Google nuked one of the pages. I'll let you guess which one :(

So my question is: What is the best way to fix the problem? Do I nuke the new page and just let Google 404 on it? Do I 301 the new page to the old? What is the best way to handle this?

Thank you for your help.

[Mel]

I would suggest a 301 from the page you do not want ranked to the one that you do.

Alternately you could either:

Restrict spidering of the page you do not want ranked in your robots.txt file.
Remove the page you do not want to rank f rom your site and submit a request to Google to remove the page from its index.

[ThouShaltSeo]

best option IMO. It's done within 24 hours when the others take months.

Remove the page you do not want to rank f rom your site and submit a request to Google to remove the page from its index.

[phpmaven]

So you are saying that I should delete the page and restrict access via robots.txt and then submit a delete request and then just leave the original page as is and they will reindex it, right?

Thank you both for your replies.