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Yes, the Yoast plug-in's settings will alter your robots.txt and fix the problem across your site.

This is a very valid question, in my opinion, and one that I have thought about a lot. I even did it on a site before on a UGC section where there were about 30k empty questions, many of which were a reputation nightmare for the site. We used the parameters of: Over a year old Has not received an organic visit in the past year We 410d all of them as they did not have any inbound links and we just wanted them out of the index. I believe they were later 301d, and that section of the site has now been killed off. Directly after the pages were removed, we saw a lift of ~20% in organic traffic to that section of the site. That maintained, and over time that section of the site started getting more visits from organic as well. I saw it as a win and went through with it because: They were low quality They already didn't receive traffic By removing them, we'd get more pages that we wanted crawled, crawled. I think Gary's answer of "create more high quality content" is too simplistic. Yes, keep moving forward in the direction you are, but if you have the time or can hire someone else to do it, and those pages are not getting traffic, then I'd say remove them. If they are getting traffic, maybe do a test of going back and making them high quality to see if they drive more traffic. Good luck!