Should I set up no index no follow on low quality pages?

[Michael_Rock]

I know it is a good idea for duplicate pages, blog tags, etc. but I remember somewhere that you can help the overall link juice of a website by adding no index no follow or no index follow low quality content pages of your website.

Is it still a good idea to do this or was it never a good idea to begin with?

Michael

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Michael. Sites can freely employ a NOINDEX / FOLLOW on low quality content pages or other non-critical pages. It's fairly trivial and easy to change work that can be handled in-house. Obviously other things like high quality content, linking, and freshness will go much farther in terms of overall strategy, this technique is valid.  See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812.  Cheers!

[Michael_Rock]

Yes, but is this a good practice to use for low quality pages? Would it help the whole site overall?

Michael

[RyanPurkey]

Are the low quality pages necessary to the site? Or are they going to be developed at a further date? If they're not necessary to the site and always going to be low quality, it might be better to redirect them to higher quality pages. If they are necessary, then using noindex/follow is fine. The greater question is why keep them on the site if they're not necessary. Wouldn't the low quality reflect poorly on the site?

[Michael_Rock]

I had suggested combining the low quality pages to higher quality pages of the same topic, but the customer does not want to do that and wants to keep the content.

The content itself is a blog post that relates to their service. So in short the content is not necessary but is relevant to the website.

Michael

[RyanPurkey]

I see. One thing that might help you with the customer is looking at the Analytics and highlighting the performance of the low quality pages. If they're never being seen you could make the case for getting the key information from those pages, adding it to the better pages, and redirecting.  Cheers!

[MickEdwards]

As Ryan suggests you still want to FOLLOW rather than giving the bots a dead end as I notice your heading suggests no-follow.