Can adding "noindex" help with quality penalizations?

[fablau]

Hello Moz fellows,

I have another question about content quality and Panda related penalization.

I was wondering this: If I have an entire section of my site that has been penalized due to thin content, can adding "noindex,follow" to all pages belonging to that section help de-penalizing the rest of the site in the short term, while we work to improve those penalized pages, which is going to take a long time? Can that be considered a "short term solution" to improve the overall site scoring on Google index while we work to improve those penalized pages, and, once ready, we remove the "noindex" tag?

I am eager to know your thoughts on this possible strategy.

Thank you in advance to everyone!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Fabrizio,

Yes, and no.

I have seen this work in the past and I have also seen it make no difference. My feeling these days is that no-indexing doesn't solve the issue, even while being worked on, as I have seen more occurrences of it not working.

How big a problem are you trying to deal with? I did help a company with 37k pages recover from Panda a while ago, but we have to do some pretty hefty trimming of the site in order to get it back into good shape again. There issue was that thousands of pages all had big pieces of the same content on many similar pages, so we cut out a lot of the problem areas and pulled the site into something that resembled a bit more sense.

-Andy

[fablau]

Thank you Andy for your reply.

While I was waiting for an answer here, I made further research, and it looks like this can be a good strategy to cope with Panda related penalties, at least until the "bad content" is updated and improved:

https://moz.com/community/q/noindex-vs-page-removal-panda-recovery

Your thoughts?

Thank you again!

[fablau]

I am sorry, but I haven't received an affirmative answer to my last inquiry above...

[BlueCorona]

Hi Fabrizo,

I agree with Andy's response up above. No indexing is not as good as removing the content from the website altogether, but it still can work as long as there are no links or sitemaps that lead Google back to the low quality content.

No indexing the pages won't be a permanent solution, only a temporary one that might help you in the meantime.

[fablau]

Thank you for your posting, but I made further research on all this, and I tend to disagree with what you state.

It is now my understanding that if you remove a page from the index, that content is no longer considered by Google, because it is actually "out of the index"... therefore, if, let's say, a specific page or a specific section of the site which could have caused a site-wide "content" penalty is removed from the index, those pages are no longer affecting any algorithmic calculation on the quality of the site from a "contents" stand point, and such alleged "content-related penalty" should be lifted.

Anyone else can confirm that?