Getting rid of low quality

[PeterM22]

If I wanted to get rid of a batch of low quality pages from the index, Is the best practise to let them 404 and remove them from sitemap files?

Thanks

[Wayne76]

Hi Peter,

Great question considering the latest Panda update. A lot of people have been scrambling to remove content that Google might deem "shallow" or of no value to users. We implemented a couple of practices to see which worked best with regard to moving content:

A: We simply added a 'robots.txt' command. This is designed to not allow Google crawl the content.

B: If you have the luxury of moving it to an entirely different domain, that could also be a choice. We found this to be the better of the two in terms of aesthetics. We simply didn't want to gunk up our site with a lot of "shallow" content. It also seemed that the engines responded better to this approach.

Your 404 is another option if you simply want to remove it from the indexes. However, I'd be sure to check that no link juice is flowing through the pages. If so, then a 301 re-direct might be appropriate. Depending on your intentions, each of the three could serve your purpose!

Let me know if I've confused you, or if you need additional opinion!

Best of luck

W

[PeterM22]

Thanks, Wayne, I never thought about link juice flowing to those pages, I'll have to check that out before making a decision. All the pages I want to remove are in the same directory, so would adding the text below to robots.txt remove all the pages in that directory from the index?

User-agent: *

Disallow: /directory/