Best way of conserving link juice from non important pages

[James77]

If I have a bunch of non important pages on my website which are of little use in the SE's index - IE contact us pages, pages which are near duplicate and conflict with KW's targetting other pages etc, what is the best way of retaining the link juice that would normally be passed to these pages?

Most recent discussion I have read has said that with nofollow you effectively just loose link juice, as opposed to conserving it, so that doesn't seem a great option.

If I do "noindex" on these pages, would that conserve the link juice in the site, or again would it be just lost?

It seems quite a tricky situation as many pages are legitimate for customer usability, but are not worth having in the SE's index and you better off consolidating link juice - so it seems you are getting penilised for making something "for users".

Thanks

[RyanKent]

In short, provide less internally linking to less important pages. This approach is the best method to conserve link juice and allow it to flow to other more important pages.

You describe pages which are near duplicate and have keyword conflicts. Ideally those pages should be removed. If they must remain, they should be canonicalized to the primary page you want to appear in SERPs.

Some sites offer the following links in the navigation: legal, privacy policy, terms, about us, etc. You can conserve link juice by not including those links on every page, although there may be legal or other reasons you want them on all pages. You could consider a single "Site Info" form of link which presents a page links to your privacy policy and other pages.