weird situation

[R.Rapp]

So I am taking over the SEO/administration of this website made through Joomla - and I am not exactly sure how the previous webmaster did this but they apparently had a testing site prior to putting the main site up. The weird thing is that the testing site is under companyname.com/companyname testing site. That part even has its own Joomla login. Spaces and all in the domain name like that too.

Due to this, the majority of the current website is duplicated through just companyname.com/whatevercategory and companyname.com/companyname testing site/whatevercategory.

So I thought a way to remedy this would be to unpublish those duplicated pages and then possibly uninstall that joomla instance. However, if I unpublish or make any changes to a page under the testing site then it is mirrored on the page on the regular site - so I am worried if I uninstall that instance of Joomla it will take down the entire site - so won't be trying that.

I figure I can just add a line to robot.txt that says Disallow /companyname testing site/ and de-index those duplicated pages that way

Have any of you ever seen this or know of a better way to fix this?

Also I know there is a whole debate here on duplicate content being a myth or real - I really don't want to get into the debate - I would rather play it safe and remove all this since the entire page - graphics and all are entirely duplicated.

Thoughts?

[InternetMarketingIQ]

Just use a robots text file.

Search Google first to see if any of that content is ever indexed now. Google doesn't like to crawl that deep on old dead content that is buried.

I converted a site to WordPress from Joomla. I left the old Joomla site up "Just in case".

It made ZERO difference to my overall rankings. Google doesn't penalize they just filter and drop off what they do not think is relevant.

I'm now sitting at #4 in Google for my selected targeted search phrase with the WordPress site and ALL the old Joomla content is still there buried several levels deep in a sub directory.

If you look at the Newspaper Analogy... duplicate content gets indexed and ranked. This is why Media sites can all run the same Associated Press or Reuters Story and not get "penalized".

I really like Joomla... it's a little quirky at first. The reason I switched is there are some Killer Affiliate Marketing Plugins for WordPress and it's easier to keep updated in my opinion. I also despise the built in commenting or lack thereof in Joomla. Even the commenting plugins are pretty weak.

[McBrett]

I thought that was an exceptional explanation duplicate content.