Thinking about deindexing 200,000 pages

[cbielich]

So I was hit with Panda and Penguin. Since then I have been trying to figure out what is it that Google is seeing as "low content" on my site along with links. Concerning low content I am a dictionary based site and I have over 200,000 pages which link to sepecific definitions to words like /dictionary/word/a and so on. Most of these pages if not all have a bounce rate of 100% and very little to no traffic. I used to link every word in my database in my site which is where Google got the links from to begin with. Since then I have removed those links with no impact to my rankings, but Google still has them indexed. I am thinking about deindexing all of them from Google. So all my pages with /dictionary/word/[word here] would be removed. Just wanted to get some opinions on that. Maybe a good idea?

Also what would be the preferred method to deindex them.

Robots.txt?

noindex tag?

[AndreVanKets]

If the pages are there for user experience only, and you dont expect any of these pages to rank, I would block google bot from scanning the pages/categories you want to remove using the robots.txt, as well as making the headers on all these pages no-index (for good measure)

Once you have set this up, you can request the url's to be removed in your G-WMT account.

We had loads of booking pages and media directories indexed, and this is what we did to get them out of the index. Not sure how it improves ranks, but it definitely tells Google which pages are most important preventing Google resources being spent on pages that are not important.

Hope that helps?

Greg

[cbielich]

How many pages did you deindex?

[cbielich]

I decided to noindex all the pages, but I brought the links back that point to these pages but added the nofollow attribute as well to all of those. From a Google standpoint these pages are not worth indexing, but for user experience the links are needed.

Thanks