Hey there mememax - thank you for the reply!  Reading your post and thinking back to our methodology, yes I think in hindsight we were a bit too afraid about generating errors when we removed content - we should have considered the underlying meaning of the different statuses more carefully. I appreciate your advice.

Eric

Hello Dr. Pete – thank you for the great info and advice!

I do have one follow-up question if that's ok – as we move forward cutting undesirable content and generate 4xx status for those pages, is there a difference in impact/effectiveness between a 403 and a 404? We use a CMS and un-publishing a page creates a 403 “Access denied” message. Deleting a page will generate a 404. I would love to hear your opinion about any practical differences from a Googlebot standpoint… does a 404 carry more weight when it comes to content removal, or are they the same to Googlebot?  If there’s a difference and the 404 is better, we’ll go the 404 route moving forward.

Thanks again for all your help,

Eric

Hello,

I was hoping to get the SEOmoz community’s advice on how to remove content most effectively from a large website.

I just read a very thought-provoking thread in which Dr. Pete and Kerry22 answered a question about how to cut content in order to recover from Panda.  (http://www.seomoz.org/q/panda-recovery-what-is-the-best-way-to-shrink-your-index-and-make-google-aware).

Kerry22 mentioned a process in which 410s would be totally visible to googlebot so that it would easily recognize the removal of content.  The conversation implied that it is not just important to remove the content, but also to give google the ability to recrawl that content to indeed confirm the content was removed (as opposed to just recrawling the site and not finding the content anywhere).

This really made lots of sense to me and also struck a personal chord… Our website was hit by a later Panda refresh back in March 2012, and ever since then we have been aggressive about cutting content and doing what we can to improve user experience.

When we cut pages, though, we used a different approach, doing all of the below steps:
1. We cut the pages
2. We set up permanent 301 redirects for all of them immediately.
3. And at the same time, we would always remove from our site all links pointing to these pages (to make sure users didn’t stumble upon the removed pages.

When we cut the content pages, we would either delete them or unpublish them, causing them to 404 or 401, but this is probably a moot point since we gave them 301 redirects every time anyway.  We thought we could signal to Google that we removed the content while avoiding generating lots of errors that way…

I see that this is basically the exact opposite of Dr. Pete's advice and opposite what Kerry22 used in order to get a recovery, and meanwhile here we are still trying to help our site recover.  We've been feeling that our site should no longer be under the shadow of Panda.

So here is what I'm wondering, and I'd be very appreciative of advice or answers for the following questions:

1. Is it possible that Google still thinks we have this content on our site, and we continue to suffer from Panda because of this?  
Could there be a residual taint caused by the way we removed it, or is it all water under the bridge at this point because Google would have figured out we removed it (albeit not in a preferred way)?

2.  If there’s a possibility our former cutting process has caused lasting issues and affected how Google sees us, what can we do now (if anything) to correct the damage we did?

Thank you in advance for your help,
Eric