Large number of thin content pages indexed, affect overall site performance?

[cogbox]

Hello Community,

Question on negative impact of many virtually identical calendar pages indexed.

We have a site that is a b2b software product. There are about 150 product-related pages, and another 1,200 or so short articles on industry related topics. In addition, we recently (~4 months ago) had Google index a large number of calendar pages used for webinar schedules. This boosted the indexed pages number shown in Webmaster tools to about 54,000.

Since then, we "no-followed" the links on the calendar pages that allow you to view future months, and added "no-index" meta tags to all future month pages (beyond 6 months out). Our number of pages indexed value seems to be dropping, and is now down to 26,000.

When you look at Google's report showing pages appearing in response to search queries, a more normal 890 pages appear. Very few calendar pages show up in this report.

So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site? One person at the company said that because Panda/Penguin targeted thin-content sites that these pages would cause the performance of this site to drop as well.

Thanks for your feedback.

Chris

[Bryant-Jaquez]

Unless a page can give value to a searcher (not just an existing customer) it shouldn't be in Google's search index.

Sometimes I like to go back to the basics. Remember that search engines exist to help people find information that they WANT to find. Realistically, people are not going to want to find every page on your websites in SERPS.I suggest you ask yourself this question; does this page offer information that someone would actually want to search for, and make your decision accordingly.

p.s. Having said all of that, I'll answer your question. The answer is yes, having thin pages on your site can hurt your domain. If your pages offer value to searchers, I suggest you improve them instead of remove them, but if they don't offer value to searchers don't waste your time, and just no-index them.

[EGOL]

So, the question that has been raised is: Does a large number of pages in a search index with very thin content (basically blank calendar months) hurt the overall site?

Yes.

We had a site with some image content pages that had not a lot of text.  They ranked great for years.  Then, BAM, rankings across the site dropped on a Panda update.

We added noindex/follow to these pages, redirected some that were obsolete and our rankings came back with the next update.