Can I noindex most of my site?

[mascotmike]

A large number of the pages on my site are pages that contain things like photos and maps  that are useful to my visitors, but would make poor landing pages and have very little written content. My site is huge. Would it be benificial to noindex all of these?

[JeanYates]

Just a thought, but I'd make sure there aren't any incoming links to those pages. I don't know if google would see them on a nofollow page. And we know how much we love incoming links1

[mascotmike]

There are definitely no links to those pages, so I have nothing to lose there.

[JeanYates]

We had an SEO guru at our etailing meeting yesterday and he said the problem is DUPLICATE pages, not the number. He told a woman with 4000 pages not to worry about nofollows unless there were duplications.

[mascotmike]

As these pages only have a sentence or two of unique content each (e.g. a photo caption), they are pretty much duplicate pages. This is why I think they might be harming my site after the UK Panda Update. I have now noindexed them all, but is it bad to have the majority of pages on your site as noindex? Should I also nofollow the links to them so that Google is less likely to see them?

I appreciate your help.

[Marcus_Miller]

You have pretty much answered this question yourself by saying that the would make poor landing pages. If that is the case,  and they are useful for site users,  but not for search then, yeah,  noindex them.

There is no need to nofollow those links either, you can if you want, but I don't see the point as the crawlers will hit your page, see the noindex tag and ignore it.