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Hi David, Sounds like you're on the right track there which is great, though it's often better to fix the problem rather than mask it with de-indexing. Even something like giving people an opportunity to write a bio about themselves could be a great way to get some unique content on these otherwise-empty pages as a quick example. I have seen a correlation between bounce rate and rankings. This doesn't necessarily mean causation of course but whether it's because of that bounce rate or the reason__s people are bouncing less, the ranking result is going to be the same Moz also covered this topic back in August too.

I'll add this article by Rand that I came across too. I'm busy testing the solution presented in it: https://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo In summary, 404 all dead pages with a good custom 404 page so as to not waste crawl bandwidth. Then selectively 301 those dead pages that have accrued some good link value. Thanks Donna/Tammy for pointing me in this direction..

You should 302 redirect non-authenticated users to http://twiends.com/login. This is a better user experience, and you avoid the potential authentication issues with the 301. It's also not really correct or useful to make it a 301 redirect: users aren't being 'permanently' redirected to the login page, and there's not much utility in forcing link juice to be passed from /settings to /login either. So requests to /settings should either show that user's settings or 302 redirect to /login. Don't duplicate the home page content and rely on a canonical tag. Your domain (and domain authority) are still going to benefit, and I just don't think there's enough of a case to sculpt the flow of link juice in this way. As Andreas has pointed out, the link juice isn't the most important consideration here; it's better to focus on user experience. Your homepage's ability to rank for any given term is unlikely to be affected by the decision to 'rel=canonical' all private pages to the home page.