De-indexing thin content & Panda--any advantage to immediate de-indexing?

[nicole.healthline]

We added the nonidex, follow tag to our site about a week ago on several hundred URLs, and they are still in Google's index. I know de-indexing takes time, but I am wondering if having those URLs in the index will continue to "pandalize" the site. Would it be better to use the URL removal request? Or, should we just wait for the noindex tags to remove the URLs from the index?

[RyanKent]

You want to be a bit more patient. Depending on how popular and deep these pages are within your site, I would expect it to take several weeks to see most of them disappear. There is a good chance if you check you will find a percentage of those pages are disappearing each day.

The de-index tool is to remove content which you consider harmful to your business. Of course, any damage to your SEO rankings could be considered harmful, but that is clearly not what Google means. If you use the tool, they clearly explain it is for pages which need to "urgently" need to be removed due to legal reasons, copyright issues, etc.

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

I don't think it would make a great deal of difference as you are going to need to wait for a full crawl of your site anyhow before you see any benefits.

Out of interest, how are  you identifying the low quality pages? One way to have a go at this is to use your analytics and identify all pages with a 100% bounce rate and noindex all of them. If there are lots (sounds like there are) you can do them in chunks and see what happens.

Don't get rid of pages that are doing good search traffic or have a low bounce rate UNLESS you know they are really poor pages as sooner or later, they will be picked up.

Ultimately, it sounds like a big site so you are going to have to be patient here and make incremental changes based on analytical and crawl data until you get the results you are looking for.

I have pulled a site back from the depths, a rather unfairly punished site in my opinion that just got it's content copied by several other sites but the same rules applied. We updated pages, removed blocks of template content to their own pages and just kept on watching and like magic, it came back stronger than before a week or so after we made all the changes.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

[ShaMenz]

Whenever Matt Cutts discusses this subject in the Webmaster Tools videos and elsewhere, there is always a caveat along the lines of "while google mostly take notice of noindex and robots.txt, this may not always be acted upon". The primary reason given for this seems to be if content is indexed via a link from another site, or exists in google cache. In these cases it seems logical that it may continue to appear in the index.

Your question reminded me of Dr Pete's Catastrophic Canonicalization Experiment - it seems his method proved quite effective