Which is better duplicate or 404?

[Chidorix]

Which is better if I have - 3000 - duplicate pages or - 3000 - 404 error pages?

I dont have any other options.
Please give me an advice!

 

[Aty]

Neither one, but if I had to choose I'd go with 404s.

 

[SEOmammoth]

Duplicate is probably worse in terms of SEO, id go with 404

 

[dg281119]

You can just set those pages as noindex.

 

[proxys_io]

Maybe noindex? And why so many...

 

[Blakester]

Which is better if I have - 3000 - duplicate pages or - 3000 - 404 error pages?

I dont have any other options.
Please give me an advice!

301 the dups. If you can't , I guess 404.

 

[dg281119]

301 the dups. If you can't , I guess 404.

Even if he uses 301 he will still have 3.000 indexed duplicated pages and I don't think it's a good idea to redirect 3.000 pages to the same page.

I would just use the nofollow tag

 

[seooo]

Noindex them via a html meta tag or block them in robots.txt and they will drop naturally/slower as they are crawled by the bot. The faster route is to mass delete them (=404 not found). The gracious route is to 301 redirect them (=permanently moved) to their correspondent via htaccess.