URL Profiler might be worth checking out:

http://urlprofiler.com/

It does require that you use a proxy, since Google does not like you scraping their search results.

I'm aware of the fact Google will get to them sooner or later.

The recommendation from Gary Illyes (from Google), as mentioned in this post, was the reason for my asking the question. Not trying to outsmart Google, just trying to work within their guidelines in the most efficient way possible.

Thanks, Mike.

What are your thoughts on creating a page with links to all of the pages we've Noindexed, doing a Fetch As and submitting that URL and its linked pages? Do you think Google would dislike that?

There are too many pages to do that (unless we created a page with links to all of the Noindexed pages, then asked Google to crawl that and all linked pages, though that seems like it might be a bad approach). It's an ecommerce website and we Noindexed nearly 4,000 pages that had thin or duplicate content (manufacturer descriptions, no description on brand page, etc) and had no organic traffic in the past 90 days.

This site was hit by Panda in September 2014 and isn't ranking for things it should be – pages with better backlink profiles, higher DA/PA, better content, etc. than our competitors. Our thought is we're not ranking because of a penalty against thin/duplicate content. So we decided to Noindex these pages, improve the content on products that are selling and getting traffic, then work on improving pages that we've Noindex before switching them back to Index.

Basically following recommendations from this article: https://moz.com/blog/pruning-your-ecommerce-site

Thanks for your response!

I did some more digging. This seems to contradict your suggestion:

https://twitter.com/methode/status/653980524264878080

If the goal is to have these pages removed from the index, and having them in the sitemap means they'll be picked up sooner by Google's crawler, then it seems to make sense that they should be included until they're removed from the index.

Am I misinterpreting this?

We just added tags to our pages with thin content.

Should we include or exclude those urls from our sitemap.xml file? I've read conflicting recommendations.

URL Profiler might be worth checking out:

http://urlprofiler.com/

It does require that you use a proxy, since Google does not like you scraping their search results.