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yes the no content page thing is a big problem.  If you have a "view all" option, and it's more than a dozen, fifteen or maybe 20 products, that should be paginated, with full indexing.  Maile Oyhe even talked about that specific scenario of "view all" being good. In my experience, all of the no-content pages should, ideally, be 301 redirected in a way that they point to the most relevant highest level category page on your site. Since there's so many, there's no easy way to get them removed from the index other than doing the 301 then being patient as Google recrawls then re-confirms.