Thin/Duplicate Content

[DPASeo]

Hi Guys,

So here's the deal, my team and I just acquired a new site using some questionable tactics. Only about 5% of the entire site is actually written by humans the rest of the 40k + (and is increasing by 1-2k auto gen pages a day)pages are all autogen + thin content. I'm trying to convince the powers that be that we cannot continue to do this.

Now i'm aware of the issue but my question is what is the best way to deal with this. Should I noindex these pages at the directory level? Should I 301 them to the most relevant section where actual valuable content exists. So far it doesn't seem like Google has caught on to this yet and I want to fix the issue while not raising any more red flags in the process.

Thanks!

[DPASeo]

Each page is about 100 words all of which are exact duplicates except for where the "keyword" for that page is changed.

So like  "Keyword" in California      /    "Keyword" in Nevada

and so on.

Yeah the long term goal is to get rid of these pages all together, but in the mean time i'd feel much better if our Real to Auto gen ratio was 1 : 0  instead of the current  1 : 1,000.   Simply blocking them in the robots.txt will make 95% of the site become a 404. So far my best bet is to Noindex, Follow the pages to give me to to actually fix the internal linking of the site. I'm just not sure if I should do all pages at once or do them slowly over time?

[AlanMosley]

do these pages have incomming links? if not then there is nothing to gain by 301ing them, excluding them in them in robots.txt will cause link juice leaks when you have internal links pointing to them. You can use a no-index,follow meta tag, this will allow link juice to flow to and back out of the non indexed pages, saving link juice.

But one would ask why have the pages if they are not in the index?