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@Ryan, thx for your answer. The pagerank flow is indeed one of the things I worry about when deindexing large parts of the site. Especcialy since the category pages will be full of internal links to productpages that are excluded from indexation by robots.txt or robots meta.

The problem I am trying to solve however has nothing to do with pagerank sculpting. I suspect an algorithmic drop due to thin, duplicate and syndicated content. The drop is sitewide. Assuming that the drop is due to panda I suspect the percentage of low quality pages should  be optimized. Would outlinking  and better DA really be sufficient to counter a suspected Panda problem?  Or is it required to make the 10.000 product pages of better quality, I would think the latter. Since there is no budget to do so I wonder if it is possible to drop these low quality pages from the index (but keep them in the website). Would this strenghten the remaining pages to bounce back up, assuming these remaining pages are of good quality offcourse.

Since SEO is not the only factor to be taken into account I'd rather not delete these pages from the website.

A Dutch webshop with 10.000 productpages is experiencing lower rankings and indexation. Problems started last october, a little while after the panda and penguin update.

One of the problems diagnosed is the lack of unique content. Many of the productpages lack a description and some are variants of eachother. (color, size, etc). So a solution could be to write unique descriptions and use rel canonical to concentrate color/size variations to one productpage.

There is however no capacity to do this on short notice. So now I'm wondering if the following is effective.

Exclude all productpages via noindex, robots.txt. IN the same way as you can do with search pages. The only pages left for indexation are homepage and 200-300 categorypages.  We then write unique content and work on the ranking of the categorypages. When this works the product pages are rewritten and slowly reincluded, category by category.

My worry is the loss of ranking for productpages. ALthoug the ranking is minimal currently. My second worry is the high amount of links on category pages that lead to produtpages that will be excluded rom google. Thirdly, I am wondering if this works at all. using noindex on 10.000 productpages consumes crawl budget and dillutes the internal link structure.

What do you think?

@JCP Vlemmix,

Thx for your reply. I does however not entirely anwer my question.

To my information Google may include the date in the snippet on the SERP. The date used can be the crawldate or a date mentioned on the webpage. I am not exactly sure how to influence the date shown in the snippet.

I have pages that were created long time ago and are update regularly, by me and user comments. I would like this page to carry a recent date that is shown in the snippet on the SERP.

For know I am going to run a test on a few pages in which I show the date on the webpage in a USA date format. If Google picks up this date i conitnue testing with updating this date on the webpage everytime the webpage is updated. How do you manage the date in the snippet?

I have a website with sauna reviews. These are mostly pages that exist for years and regularly change because comments/reviews are added by visitors and/or because I change information on the page.

When searching in Google for competitive keywords I noticed that the snippet of my direct competitor included a date stamp in the format (9 hous ago).

How can I include a time stamp in the snippet, and more important how can I make sure that the timestamp is very recent.

Is it sufficient to add a date on the page every time the page is updated or is ther emore to it?