When to consolidate and when to bid Link Juice farewell?

[keL.A.xT.o]

Greetings all!

I've got a couple of questions about when and if it's alright to let accumulated Link Juice (LJ) slip into the depths of oblivion. I arrived 4 years late to the ticketing website that I work for (www.charged.fm), and found the website in a certain state of disarray. For the past 6 months I've been trying to wrap my head around SEO and our 750k+ page site, and lately we've been making good progress cleaning things up and redesigning. I'm at a loss, though, as to what to do with some pages.

Example: The blog director has been using hash tags for years now that created new pages for each different #, which created a lot of instances of 2 [bytag] pages for 2 different hash tags that had the same article on them.

http://www.charged.fm/blog/bytag/31631/steve-masiello-usf
http://www.charged.fm/blog/bytag/31632/steve-masiello-south-florida

We've added 'noindex, follow' to this directory (which is the correct solutions, riiight??), but now I'm wondering if some of these pages should be 301'd to more relevant sections of the site, or back to the blog homepage. I know this could be bad for UI, but I don't believe that they're frequently used pages and don't want to let these PA 15 pages go to waste. Any thoughts on this?

Example 2: A similar situation is that they used 302s to redirect to search results pages instead of using category pages. So now there are hundreds, if not thousands, of search results pages that have a PA of 15 or more.

http://www.charged.fm/search/results/music-tickets

We're working on restructuring the site and removing the 302s, but I'm wondering if it's necessary to 301 all of the search results pages to the new category pages like so:

http://www.charged.fm/search/results/music-tickets >>> http://www.charged.fm/concert-tickets

This would require the programmer to create new search/results pages in order to 301 the old ranking ones, correct? Should I put this in queue for him or just leave the search results pages with 'noindex, follow' and let the PA 15 go to waste?

There are many other instances like this like a Login page with PA 20, and I just can't decide if everything should be redirected or what to leave as dust in the wind. Because all we are is dust in the wind ; )

Thanks for any help,

Luke

[keL.A.xT.o]

Thanks Jane! That's the affirmation I was looking for. If I might, one more question:

In your opinion, is PA 15 too valuable to leave on a page with no real purpose? Is it relative to the site?

Thanks again,
Luke Thomas

[JaneCopland]

Hi Luke,

Noindex, follow will work fine for the duplicated tag pages, although you could consider canonicalising them or redirecting them to a more useful resource - if you can do this en masse in an automated way, or if you only do this manually for tags / topics of high importance.

302ing to the search pages isn't good for two reasons: one, search engines traditionally don't follow or pass PR through a 302, and they also prefer you don't include your own "search pages" in their indexes. The "easy" way around this is exactly as you describe: produce quality category pages in place of what was a search results page. You can probably get away with having search pages indexed, and many companies get them to rank, but what Google wants to avoid is the indexation of hundreds or thousands of random search results pages from a website, often with complex query strings that can result in almost infinite numbers of pages being created.

Cheers,

Jane