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Hey there! Sam from Moz's Help team here! It can be difficult to properly look into this without additional information - would you mind popping an email over to help@moz.com so we can take a deeper dive into what may be going on here?

Glad to help!

Hello, There are a lot of factors to consider here. In addition to Bryan's excellent breakdown of time vs. reward, another thing to consider is where these pages are sitting in the rankings, how long it might take to put them in an excellent traffic-gaining situation, and what you can leverage out of them in terms of value. In situations like this, if I choose to take action and begin ranking pages, I give myself 6 months to see what kind of rewards I can reap. If within 6 months I haven't seen promising movement of the bottom line, then I move on to a new tactic. Hopefully this helps - best of luck moving forward! Rob

I tried many different htaccess file codings (such as recommended here), but they didn't work. Had to succumb to using the outdated Meta Robots plugin by Yoast, which can add the "noindex" code to the http header of /feed/ URLs. But, at least it's a solution: http://wordpress.org/plugins/robots-meta/. Hopefully this helps someone else.

If you read my post you will see I said noindex,nofollow not follow, if you would like to remove them then that will do the same job. A>B>C take out B and problem solved either way

Thanks, Wissam.

First off, thanks everyone for your replies I'm well versed in best practices of 301 redirects, sitemaps, etc, etc. In other words, I fully know the optimal way to handle this. But, this is one of those situations where there are so many redirects involved (thousands) for a large site, that I want to make sure that what we are doing is fully worth the development time. We are migrating a large website that was already migrated to a different CMS several years ago. There are thousands of legacy 301 redirects already in place for the current site, and many of those pages that are being REDIRECTED TO (from the old URL versions) receive very little/if any traffic. We need to decide if the work of redirecting them is worth it. I'm not as worried about broken links for pages that don't get any traffic (although we ideally want 0 broken links). What I am most worried about, however, is losing domain authority and the whole site potentially ranking a little bit lower overall as a result. Nakul's response (and Frederico's) are closest to what I am asking...but everyone is suggesting the same thing...that we will lose domain authority (example measurement: SEOmoz's OpenSiteExplorer domain authority score) if we don't keep those redirects in place (but of course, avoiding double redirects). So, thanks again to everyone on this thread If anyone has a differing opinion, I'd love to hear it...but this is pretty much what I expected: everyone's best educated assessment is that you will lose domain authority when 301 redirects are lifted and broken links are the end result.

I don't get why you would have tracking on the image, Takeshi may be correct, but I would not do it myself as it may be a low quality signal. I know that the Bing Api will detect it as a duplicate files, what they will do about I don't know.

I am looking into this a lot too.  Our company has 1.2 million pages indexed in Google.  That sounds good except that 1.03 M are from our search results pages.  I am advising we do not keep all the search result pages index; the issues is we are making a lot of money off of them.  What did you find worked best for you? what did you decide to do?

Thank you, Ian. We thought about manually setting the canonicals on specific pages of site B to be the URL of the same article on site A...but we don't have the bandwidth to do this for 8,000 articles...plus, we're redirecting site B to site A in @ 9 months anyways. Really just looking for the best short term solution to protect site A in the meantime from Panda updates targeting duplicate content. EGOL gives a good breakdown of what he thinks is best. Thanks for sharing that link. I guess I'm dummy for forgetting that the "follow" portion of "noindex,follow" allows link juice to be spread to the pages linked to from the "noindex" page. That makes logical sense...but will it protect our domain authority? I would think so, but don't know for sure. If anyone is more certain than I am, please do add a vote of confidence

Yep, already implemented. Good point though.