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I've just now deleted many pages from my website (with 410 status) which were product pages and copied from respective companies.

Will now search engine rankings improve for my site?

I hope it should take 4-6 weeks for this.

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Search engines don't rank websites. They rank individual pages.

What made you decide to delete them? It's okay to have the same products as other websites. If you couldn't then only one website would be found when doing product searches and we know that isn't the case. And that is even with them all using the same product description. (It's very common to use the manufacturers product description and specs for a product's listing).

Assuming the pages were duplicate content, they either were already filtered out by Google or devalued as being duplicates so they weren't helping you to begin with (i.e. links from those pages didn't count, PageRank wasn't passed. etc). So removing them only makes Google's life easier but doesn't directly affect your other pages. The only benefit you may see is by not linking to those pages anymore you have fewer links to "bad" pages and thus have more links to "good" pages which makes those links a little bit stronger (pass more PageRank, stronger link value). But in all reality that gain will be barely noticeable if it is noticeable at all unless it was a very large number of pages.

Another thing to consider, if those pages weren't being penalized buy Google in anyway, this may actually hurt you. If those pages weren't filtered out, reduced in value, etc, then you had more pages that were linking to your important pages (i.e. home page, main product pages, etc) and now you have fewer which hurts those pages. It would be only a small hit but a hit nonetheless. Not to mention you have fewer pages in their index and thus have fewer opportunities to be found.

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  • Another important concern is that Adsense/Chikita or other advertising companies will reject my site with duplicate content. They wouldn't know if it is copyright or not. Also I don't want to agree that only pages get penalized. If pages in my site link to bad neighbourhood won't my full site be penalized? I think you want to say that PR's are for each page. I agree. But the main question will be then, if I accept your suggestions will be then how to copy product pages and still get accepted with the advertising network companies.
    – AgA
    Jul 14, 2011 at 15:49
  • Another thing i forgot to mention is that I'm not selling any of those products which I deleted also they were all crap and almost useless so my business does not suffer due to it but there seems to be good chance that the SEO rankings of my site may increase.
    – AgA
    Jul 14, 2011 at 15:51
  • Removing the duplicates won't affect your site like you think as duplicated content is an issued handled per page. Google just ignores the duplicated content. But the whole site is not penalized.
    – John Conde
    Jul 14, 2011 at 17:24
  • Linking to a bad neighborhood can cause a whole site to be banned but that's a different story altogether. It doesn't have to do with ranking, it has to do with spam control. There are two sides to search engine algorithms: page ranking and spam control. They are two distinct and different things and should not be confused for one another.
    – John Conde
    Jul 14, 2011 at 17:25
  • You've talked about only Google, given your knowledge you should be correct. But Yahoo has completely discounted my site from SERP. I've another similar site but having unique content and visitor count and it is behaving normally in Yahoo. In fact all my sites seem to be behaving normally in Yahoo except for this site.
    – AgA
    Jul 16, 2011 at 9:11

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