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I added noindex tags to a bunch (1,000+) of paginated category pages on my site. I want Google to recrawl the pages so they will de-index them. Any ideas to speed up the process?

That would be bad for SEO, and search engines would not likely index the content. It's possible, but not likely. I am working with a site that has done this exact thing, and the content is not indexed.

P.S. have you tried using the Fetch as Googlebot tool in WMT?

So you are certain that you never had any type of redirect or canonical tag that might account for this. Hmmm, this looks weird.

After looking at this issue and your previous question, I'm stumped. I don't see any redirects, canonicals, etc that could cause this. My best suggestion is to try to get the ear of someone at Google (maybe try Matt Cutts?).

I have heard multiple reports recently of spammy backlinks hurting a site. Seems Google is more willing to penalize a site for bad linking practices.

Well, good news. I implemented a strategy based on the assumption that our site was just outside Google's duplicate content or quality guidelines. Our traffic rebounded yesterday!

Yes, you probably should.

You should be fine with that, because it is a 301 redirect.

"Could the /redirect cause a problem when crawled by Google"
Possibly. What type of redirect is it? 301, 302 JavaScript, Meta Refresh?

I prefer to use the normal WordPress "Leave a Reply".

OK. Well, my suggested strategy would be:

1. Go through the list Todd gave to make sure that there is nothing wrong on your site. If not, you can probably assume it was a Google algorithm tweak, so proceed to...
2. Work on improving your site, starting with any areas you know of that might be an issue. I would say any content that is not unique would be a good place to start.

Are your articles unique or are they syndicated?

I'm sure there are some people that do prioritize their sitemap manually, but not me. I don't think the priority setting is THAT important!

I'm assuming that you have a CMS? Maybe you can program your CMS to generate the sitemap and automatically assign priorities. If not, don't worry about it - the priorities only apply to crawl priority, not rankings.

I think you should only use the subdomain tactic if you need to divide your lower quality content from your higher quality content. This may allow your higher quality content to rank while your lower quality content stays penalized.

See http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2011/07/wsj-wtf-google-panda-subdomains.htm for more details.

Keep in mind that PageRank is based soly on the backlinks pointing to your site. Having a "nice site" won't directly influence PageRank in any way. Also, PageRank is only 1 of many Google ranking factors...I recommend that you not pay too much attention to it.

Yes, it's a lot to do, and only time will tell how much we have to do to get results...

My current strategy is to

1. Reduce the number of duplicate content pages by adding noindex tags to pages that don't really need to be indexed.
2. Add unique content to pages with duplicate content that I do want to be indexed.

Yes, a site I worked with lost all traffic on the 6th. See http://www.seomoz.org/q/website-penalized-3-times-by-google

It sounds like it was a change in the duplicate content algorithms.

I got a PM from another user who has a site with known duplicate content that was also penalized on July 6th. To my mind, that is further evidence that our site is suffering from algorithmic penalties due to duplicate content.