Noindex user profile

[thomasvanderkleij]

I have a social networking site with user- and company profiles. Some profiles have little to no content. One of the users here at moz suggested noindex-ing these profiles. I am still investigating this issue and have some follow up questions:

1. What is the possible gain of no-indexing uninteresting profiles? Especially interested in this since these profiles do bring in long-tail traffic atm.
2. How "irreversable" is introducing a noindex directive? Would everything "return to normal" if I remove te noindex directive?
3. When determining the treshold for having profiles indexed, how should the following items be weighed

• Sum of number of words on the page (comprised of one or more of the following: full name, city, 0 to N company names, bio, activity)
• (unique) Profile picture
• (Nofollowed) Links to user's profiles on social networks  or user's own site.
• Embedded Google Map

Thanks!

[AlanMosley]

1. unless you have a big thin content problem there is no gain

2. completely reversible, just remove and wait

3. you will have to decide, you seem like you are on the right track.

4. Question you should have asked, is there any downside to no-indexing these pages, Answer Yes there is, all links pointing to a no-indexed page will leak all their link juice, noindex is a last resort, I have never used.

if you must noindex a page, do it with a meta no-index,follow tag, note that was "follow", not "no-follow", then your link juice will flow into the page and back out again.

[Chris.Menke]

The gain would be that you don't index a bunch of URLs on your site that contain essentially similar/thin content. I wouldn't necessarily count those that do bring in long tail traffic as ones you'd want to noindex. Things will return to normal once you remove the noindex, but unless you have decent links pointing to those profiles, it may take up to numerous months to for them to be recrawled.  I'd  weigh most heavily links (followed or no followed) to the profiles from decent sites, as well as activity that shows on the profile page.  The rest I wouldn't consider in the threshold calculation.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

The one thing I would add to your list of criteria, if you choose to go that route, is to look at Google Analytics landing pages and make sure the individual profiles don't any inbound search traffic.