Best way to remove low quality paginated search pages

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

I have a website that has around 90k pages indexed, but after doing the math I realized that I only have around 20-30k pages that are actually high quality, the rest are paginated pages from search results within my website. Every time someone searches a term on my site, that term would get its own page, which would include all of the relevant posts that are associated with that search term/tag. My site had around 20k different search terms, all being indexed.  I have paused new search terms from being indexed, but what I want to know is if the best route would be to 404 all of the useless paginated pages from the search term pages. And if so, how many should I remove at one time? There must be 40-50k paginated pages and I am curious to know what would be the best bet from an SEO standpoint. All feedback is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[FedeEinhorn]

What I would do, and did for my site, is to noindex (via meta tag) all those search results pages, they actually don't provide any value, you don't want them indexed, those are pages for users searching your site. If a user searches for a term that you have an article/product or whatever, they will find the article/product page more interesting than a search result page, google probably won't even show that in the SERPs...

[MoosaHemani]

I agree with Fede, search results pages do not contain any value and search engine might not find it good! The better idea is to block all search result URLs from robots.txt and try to index the real pages that contain value to search engine as well as your end user!

Hope this helps!

[DennisSeymour]

If this was in wordpress, there are plugins to mass fix this or you can just do it the hard way. I would just opt to remove those from being indexed but follow them. Shouldnt hurt too much and will help in the long run.

[WebServiceConsulting.com]

According to this article http://www.seroundtable.com/farmer-headers-13111.html

It sounds like I should be 404ing these pages since I never plan to re-writer them and I want them removed from my site and from the index.

According to this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-robotstxt-advice-12759.html

They believe you shouldn't use robots.txt..

Anyone know the best option in this situation? Should I just 404 a handful of the 40k pagination pages every week/month until they are all 404'd?