NOINDEX content still showing in SERPS after 2 months

[NormanNewsome]

I have a website that was likely hit by Panda or some other algorithm change. The hit finally occurred in September of 2011. In December my developer set the following meta tag on all pages that do not have unique content:

name="robots" content="NOINDEX" />

It's been 2 months now and I feel I've been patient, but Google is still showing 10,000+ pages when I do a search for site:http://www.mydomain.com

I am looking for a quicker solution. Adding this many pages to the robots.txt does not seem like a sound option. The pages have been removed from the sitemap (for about a month now). I am trying to determine the best of the following options or find better options.

1. 301 all the pages I want out of the index to a single URL based on the page type (location and product). The 301 worries me a bit because I'd have about 10,000 or so pages all 301ing to one or two URLs. However, I'd get some link juice to that page, right?
2. Issue a HTTP 404 code on all the pages I want out of the index. The 404 code seems like the safest bet, but I am wondering if that will have a negative impact on my site with Google seeing 10,000+ 404 errors all of the sudden.
3. Issue a HTTP 410 code on all pages I want out of the index. I've never used the 410 code and while most of those pages are never coming back, eventually I will bring a small percentage back online as I add fresh new content. This one scares me the most, but am interested if anyone has ever used a 410 code.

Please advise and thanks for reading.

[NormanNewsome]

Just wanted to let you know that submitting all the sites I wanted removed into an XML sitemap worked. I then submitted that sitemap to webmaster tools and listed it in the robots.txt. When doing query "site:domain.com" index pages went from 20k+ down to 700 in a matter of days.

[NormanNewsome]

I could link to them then, but what about creating a custom sitemap for just content that I want removed? Would that have the same effect?

[EGOL]

If they are not linked to then spiders will not find the noindex code.  They could suffer in the SERPs for months and months.

[Webmaster_SEO]

If all these pages are under a directory structure than you have the option to remove a complete directory in URL removal option. See if that is feasible in your case.

[NormanNewsome]

I suppose I'll wait longer. Crawl rate over the last 90 days is a high of 3,285 and average of 550 with a low of 3 according to webmaster tools.

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[NormanNewsome]

Yeah the pages are low PR and are not linked to at all from the site. I've never heard of removing a page via webmaster tools. How do I do that? I also have to remove several thousand.

*edit: It looks like I have to remove them one at a time which is not feasible in my case. Is there a faster way?

[SteveGerencser]

If you want a page out of the index fast the best way is to do it through webmaster tools. It's easy and lasts for about six months. Then, if they find your page again it will register the noindex and you should be fine.

As EGOL said, if it's a page that isn't crawled very often then it could be a LONG time before it gets deindexed.

[EGOL]

I removed some pages from the index and used the same line of code...

name="robots" content="NOINDEX" />

My pages dropped from the index within 2 or 3 days - but this is a site that has very heavy spider activity.

If your site is not crawled very much or these are low PR pages (such as PR1, PR2) it could take google a while to revisit and act upon your noindex instructions - but two months seems a  bit long.

Is your site being crawled vigorously?  Look in webmaster tools to see if crawling declined abruptly when your rankings fell.  Check there also for crawl problems.

If I owned your site and the PR of these pages is low I would wait a while longer before doing anything.  If my patience was wearing thin I would do the 301 redirect because that will transfer the linkjuice from those pages to the target URL of the redirect - however, you might wait quite a while to see the redirect take effect.  That's why my first choice would be to wait longer.