Thanks guys

Thanks Tom

Understand your points. The idea behind noindexing is that you're telling Google not to take any notice of the page.

I guess the question is whether that works:

• Not at all
• A little bit
• A lot
• Is as good as removing the content

I believe it's definitely not as good as actually removing the content, but not sure about the other three possibilities.

We did notice that we got a small improvement in placement when we noindexed a large amount of the site and took several hundred other pages actually down. Hard to say which of those two things caused the improvement.

We've heard of it working for others, which is why I'm asking...

Appreciate your quick response

Phil

I'm wondering whether there is a consensus within the SEO community as to whether noindexing pages vs. actually removing pages is different from Google Pandas perspective?Does noindexing pages have less value when removing poor quality content than physically removing ie. either 301ing or 404ing the page being removed and removing the links to it from the site?

I presume that removing pages has a positive impact on the amount of link juice that gets to some of the remaining pages deeper into the site, but I also presume this doesn't have any direct impact on the Panda algorithm?

Thanks very much in advance for your thoughts, and corrections on my assumptions