Does Google really ignore Noindex pages?

[bizzer]

Assume I may have some pages of my site that don't have a lot of text on them, and I have to keep them on the site. Let's say there are no more than 50 like this out of 400 great pages, and the ratio of great-to-short pages continues to increase.

If I no index the short ones, will Google really ignore them in search? Will they ignore them enough to not downrank my site due to the short, noindexed pages?

I know, theoretically, they are supposed to ignore them, but I don't always trust all the rules.

[SEODinosaur]

Yes according to Google:

"How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without usingnofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

[JustinTaylor88]

If you noindex the short pages, Google will (or at least should) ignore them in search.

This is a commonly employed tactic for large E-commerce sites to their indexed product pages to allow them to concentrate their efforts on the more mainstream product lines.

Everett Sizemore covers this technique in his E-commerce SEO pro-webinar
http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues

Hope that helps