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I have a social networking site with user- and company profiles. Some profiles have little to no content. One of the users here at moz suggested noindex-ing these profiles. I am still investigating this issue and have some follow up questions:

1. What is the possible gain of no-indexing uninteresting profiles? Especially interested in this since these profiles do bring in long-tail traffic atm.
2. How "irreversable" is introducing a noindex directive? Would everything "return to normal" if I remove te noindex directive?
3. When determining the treshold for having profiles indexed, how should the following items be weighed

• Sum of number of words on the page (comprised of one or more of the following: full name, city, 0 to N company names, bio, activity)
• (unique) Profile picture
• (Nofollowed) Links to user's profiles on social networks  or user's own site.
• Embedded Google Map

Thanks!

Ok thanks! How can I determine the threshold for having profiles indexed? A common case is where a profile has a name, a company name and 1-3 links to other social profiles (twitter, linkedin etc..). Would a page like this be interesting enough to index? From a visitor's perspective I think it is; not necessarily for the content, but it has enough potential for click-through (to the company profile or to signup because the the visitor wants to connect with the owner of the profile).

Hi!

I manage a social networking site. We have a lot of public user profiles that are viewed as duplicate content. This is because these users haven't filled out any public profile info and thus the profiles are "empty" (except for the name). Is this something I should worry about? If yes, what are my options to solve this?

Thanks!