Noindex junk pages with inbound links?

[Gab-Goldenberg]

I recently came across what is to me a new SEO problem.

A site I consult with has some thin pages with a handful of ads at the top, some relevant local content sourced from a third party beneath that...

and a bunch of inbound links to said pages. Not just any links, but links from powerful news sites. My impression is that said links are paid (sidebar links, anchor text... nice number of footprints.)

Short version: They may be getting juice from these links. A preliminary lookup for one page's keywords in the title finds it top 100 on Google. I don't want to lose that juice, but do think the thin pages they link to can incur Panda's filter. They've got the same blurb for lots of [topic x] in [city y], plus the sourced content (not original...).

So I'm thinking about noindexing said pages to avoid Panda filters.

Also, as a future pre-emptive measure, I'm considering figuring out what they did to get these links and aiming to have them removed if they were really paid for. If it was a biz dev deal, I'm open to leaving them up, but that possibility seems unlikely.

What would you do? One of the options I laid out above or something else? Why?

p.s. I'm asking this on my blog (seoroi.com/blog/ ) too, so if you're up for me to quote you (and link to your site, do say so. You aren't guaranteed to be quoted if you answer here, but it's one of the easier ways you'll get a good quality link.

p.p.s. Related note: I'm looking for intermediate to advanced guest posts for my blog, which has 2000+ RSS subs. Email me at gab@ my site if you're interested. You can also PM me here on SEOmoz, though I don't login as frequently.

[Gab-Goldenberg]

These links likely aren't bringing much if any traffic, so it's a moot point here, imho.

[Loganshark]

Sorry if I was unclear. My thinking was that a high bounce rate probably indicates that many visitors don't find the content relevant. If the inbound links you mentioned are bringing lots of traffic to your pages but people are just bouncing right off the site, the value of those links is greatly diminished. If this is the case, I don't think the pages are worth keeping. If people are actually staying on the site after landing on the page, then I would focus on improving those pages and not worry as much about how they find the pages.

[Gab-Goldenberg]

I don't see the connection to bounce rate? You mean click traffic or search traffic.

[Loganshark]

I would also be interested to know what people think about this. We have an issue where a few years ago, an SEO firm produced a few dozen "articles" for our site which consisted entirely of keyword-stuffed junk with lots of hidden internal links to other relevant parts of the site. Each page has thousands of links to it from link farms and junk directories.

I suspect that there are actually many legitimate, reputable websites out there who suffer from this problem. Any website with many thousands of pages might very easily conceal the remnants of old, poorly-executed SEO efforts for years, particularly if the people making the SEO decisions are unaware of the difference between black hat/white hat practices. With the release of the farmer update, this could be a big problem.

For our situation, we wrestled with whether we should noindex the pages, remove them and implement a 301 redirect to something more relevant, or just leave them as they are. For now we have left the junk pages alone; only a couple of the pages rank within the first 50 results for their targeted keyword, and the pages receive very little traffic. However, if the pages you are talking about get a lot of traffic with a very high bounce rate, I would probably try something else.