Noindexing Thin News Content for Panda

[AlfredPennyworth]

We've been suffering under a Panda penalty since Oct 2014. We've completely revamped the site but with this new "slow roll out" nonsense it's incredibly hard to know at what point you have to accept that you haven't done enough yet.

We have thousands of news stories going back to 2001, some of which are probably thin and some of which are probably close to other news stories on the internet being articles based on press releases.

I'm considering noindexing everything older than a year just in case, however, that seems a bit of overkill. The question is, if I mine the logfiles and only deindex stuff that Google sends no further traffic to after a year could this be seen as trying to game the algo or similar?

Also, if the articles are noindexed but still exist, is that enough to escape a Panda penalty or does the page need to be physically gone?

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Alfred,

if I mine the logfiles and only deindex stuff that Google sends no further traffic to after a year could this be seen as trying to game the algo or similar?

No, this wouldn't be seen as gaming the algorithm. All you are doing is finding those pages that are serving no purpose and removing them.

if the articles are noindexed but still exist, is that enough to escape a Panda penalty or does the page need to be physically gone?

There are two thoughts on this. The noindex route is seen as the more gentle way to see if this fixes things for Google - in my experience, it is generally not enough.

What you need to remember is that even if you noindex a page, Google can still apply a penalty based on the page existing as the content can still be seen / crawled. There is no hard and fast rule to say they will, but it is a real possibility.

The advice to my customers is generally to remove the pages in question to avoid all possible doubt. Find the pages that are not delivering benefit to the site or visitors and start there.

I would be advising you undertake a content audit to fully assess the site and what really needs to be done. There is little point in killing lots of pages if it isn't lots of pages causing you issues.

-Andy