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I'm using the review tools to see which questions are being voted on as useful and not useful by anonymous/low-rep users.

And so on. I'm thinking people are landing on these pages and then not realizing they can follow the link to the actual question, is there anything we can or should do about this?

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2 Answers 2

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According to Kevin Montrose, the next update to Stack Exchange will redirect anonymous users through duplicates transparently, provided the duplicate has zero answers.

The solution, then, seems to be making sure that answers to popular duplicates get properly merged into their target question. The dupe question itself will remain, so its SEO benefits will as well.

Edit: I've checked while logged out: this feature is now in effect. A discussion about merging/deletion/redirect policy for duplicates has sprouted up here.

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    Great news, I've been flagging dupes that have potentially good answers as merge candidates, this makes everything much slicker.
    – Jorge Castro
    Commented Mar 16, 2012 at 13:12
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If the question is a clear duplicate and has useful answers, you can consider merging it into the original.

The drawback would be that you'd lose out on the terms/phrases from the duplicate appearing in the Google results thanks to being phrased differently than the original.

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    We've already found one or two that had more traffic on the duplicate than the original, so we at least have an indication of when merging in the other direction might be a better option.
    – Jorge Castro
    Commented Mar 16, 2012 at 14:11

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