Noindex all dodgy content?

[adamzski]

Hello should I be brutal with noindex? should I noindex anything of no value to websurfers?

from my understanding, nofollow is different to to noindex? Google follows through the site crawling and discovering subpages but will not put the noindexed page in serps. Is that right?

I have subcategory pages in a business directory site, these pages just have links to there subpages.

[Svetoslav]

This seems to be no problem for other directories. Take, just for example, dmoz.org. It is perfectly fine with all those links.

[adamzski]

Hi thanks, it is subcategory pages like

Heading
link
link
link
link
link
link

It is usefull content as it allows users to get to the content they want but
it has no paragraphs of text and google may not like it

[Svetoslav]

I need to ask this. If it is of no value for visitors and you are considering noindex to remove it, why is the content there in the first place.  If it is of interest to a very limited number of users I would keep it. If it is for machines only, I would get rid of it.

Noindex will make google drop the content, but users will still be able to see it. And if it is of no value to them, they would simply navigate away from it or your site.

[RyanKent]

Noindex will cause search engines to not index the page. If a page is not original, not quality content or you are certain it is not of any value to web surfers, then it would be appropriate to use noindex.

Nofollow is used when you do not trust a link, or cannot vouch for or otherwise support the source. In most cases you would not use nofollow for internal links unless you know the target page is a dead-end which will never be indexed. An example might be the "print" version of a page. When in doubt, do not use nofollow on an internal page.