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In my limited experience it's about clarity, not density. EGOL  makes a good point, if your page is clear and well written about its subject, in general you should be alright.

We have a busy blog with lots of very temporary content.  About once a year we delete a couple thousand posts.  However, before we do that we look at analytics to see which pages are pulling traffic from search. For pages that receive regular traffic, we first try to recycle the post.  If that is not possible we create a page with evergreen content so that a 301 redirect can be done.  All other pages are 301 redirected to the homepage of the blog.

Keep in mind that above the fold you have your site logo, persistent navigation, search box and other assets. I think that your ratio should be considered after the above is subtracted out. After that it depends upon presentation.  If the visitor is slapped in the face with two big ad blocks and has to scroll down to read content then that is too much.  However if ads are on the edges of the site and content is front an center than that is a lot better. Ad format can be considered too.  If your site is heavy with images then big image ads can compete with the content. My goal is to be sure that content is the most obvious thing within the design of the site and ads are subordinate. Would people want to link to ads or link to content.  Make sure that your presentation makes them linking to content. I have a high pagerank blog and link to informative sites every day.  I stopped linking to a couple very high profile sites that are household names when they started opening popups on my  visitor and having ads more obvious than content on their pages.

If for any reason a web page is not found your web server will return a 404 http header code. Wikipedia offers a very readable status code list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes The challenge you are facing is Google does not automatically de-index a link due to receiving a 404 error. At times Google might crawl a site and there can be an issue where a page is not available, or even your whole site. In my opinion the best way to handle that is for Google to wait until they have received a 404 response a few times, then remove the page. Make sure your page is not blocked by robots.txt or else Google will never be able to see the page and know it is 404'd.

Nice information John. I hadn't thought of adding a temporary page with a noindex tag but that sounds like a way to go for faster results. I know Google has automatically removed 404 pages in the past. I noticed the issue Michelle is sharing and the information you shared offers great details on the process.

Each situation is unique so there's no one answer.  Here's a great article by Lindsay on options.

I can't provide the exact url, but the dynamic content is a customized search result. User data seems to show that users prefer the content. The CTR is very high as is pageviews, and low bounce rate and they are some of the top pages in GWT. We would de-index all of the urls, but they drive a large percentage of traffic to the site. Thank you.

Google shared they tested it with numerous major sites and it is implemented. For example, search "Matt Cutts" in Google. Notice how you see his profile image to the right of his results? I believe that is due to the rel=author tag.

"I was just reading an article about how Hubpages claims they pulled through from Panda by dividing their content up on subdomains" The above responses are very valid. I would question whether there is ANY link between Panda and subdomains - as the original question asked.

Lots of great feedback has been offered. In short, it's up to your personal preference. I can't help but add a link because I have watched too many Matt Cutts videos (they are starting to auto-play in my head) and he answered your exact question. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=971qGsTPs8M

Ostensibly it's a good way to find out which are the strongest pages on your site for a particular keyword.  It won't be indicative of the strength of the page when compared to anything else on the web, but if any page from your site is going to rank for that keyword, it will probably be the first one that Google shows on that query. It's not going to tell you exactly what factors are causing it (whether it be the on-page optimization, or the links), so any analysis you would want to do would be the same as you would have to do when looking at a regular SERP.  Google thinks that first page is the most relevant page on your site for that keyword.  Why?  You can get some ideas by comparing them, but it's never going to be 100% obvious. It's a great idea - I actually never thought of doing that to check for keyword cannibalization within a site, make sure the page I want ranking to actually the first - thanks!.

The best type of user generated content is where you make users much place a specific amount into the form. It could be to win a price or something to emphasize the users to input the amount of content. Because if you have thin content which is spammy and the same all over the web it will not do much for ranks. I don't really think spelling errors are a big issue, that falls more down into usability, if you are a big brand and you have spelling errors all over your website it will not look professional.But from a UGC point of view I would not worry too much.

I would focus on the thin content that accounts for 50% of your traffic. From what I've seen Panda update may consider what visitors do when they get to your site, ie; high bounce rates, low page views, etc can negatively effect rankings. Focus on the pages that already get traffic and improve their experience and Google will reward you.

I think the ideal size is below 500k, yet I feel Google will crawl even larger sized pages if the content provides value for the users. Back in 2005 I remember Google had much tighter figures on these types of numbers yet in today's market it is a bit different, they seem to allow larger file sizes.

Have you read Google's blog post about high-quality content and sites? http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

Google Trends is really handy for this. You can check what the "Hot Searches" are right now and find one that is related to your vertical. As others have said, Twitter is great for this as well.

Whenever Matt Cutts discusses this subject in the Webmaster Tools videos and elsewhere, there is always a caveat along the lines of "while google mostly take notice of noindex and robots.txt, this may not always be acted upon". The primary reason given for this seems to be if content is indexed via a link from another site, or exists in google cache. In these cases it seems logical that it may continue to appear in the index. Your question reminded me of Dr Pete's Catastrophic Canonicalization Experiment - it seems his method proved quite effective

My best guess would be to read the great article on copywriting by cyrus shepard: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-super-easy-seo-copywriting-tips-for-link-building . The following principles could be used for writing a good description: 2. Why Headline Formulas Work 3. Get 20% More with Numbers 4. Free and Easy Power Words 10. Be Honest The page targeted keywords should be in the title.

I would also speed up your crawl rate with Google in GWT.  Yes, you can remove certain pages, but Google will need to re-index all the other pages that use to link to them.