SEO for Dormant Pages

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Alan Bleiweiss: I agree with Casey. I would add that it`s best to set the meta robots to noindex, nofollow. Noindex, follow keeps them in the crawl, which strains crawl budget. Internal links from nofollow pages pass zero link equity (since the pages are noindexed they have no equity to pass).
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  Casey Markee: It used to be our belief as SEOs that Google wanted you to 404 or 410 this “low-quality” content off, but recent statements by Google have suggested the following as the best way to overcome Panda filters. - NOINDEX the thin content then ping the sitemap so Google can drop it out of the index faster. (reference: http://www.thesempost.com/google-how-to-remove-low-quality-thin-content/) - ADD more and better quality to your site to cause a “tipping point” whereby Google can better score your entire site algorithmically (if you feel you may be suffering under some Panda filtering - https://twitter.com/jenstar/status/651904868572000256) So the "Google" answer is NOINDEX though I`ve removed content from Panda-afflicted site, then added MORE and BETTER content, and had great success. It`s definitely a "tipping point" argument with regard to quality. As for #3 - that would be a good way to decide on NOINDEX vs complete removal. That would prevent the generation of internal 404s which is clearly terrible for UX. Hope that`s helpful.
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  Neil Cheesman: How about IF deleting to then remove url via webmaster tools..?
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  Neil Cheesman: But what is.... just going back through old content - I guess easier to no index/no follow...
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  Neil Cheesman: and thanks for above...
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Do you really want to have to manually remove every time, ongoing? It`s not an ideal sustainable strategy.
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  Neil Cheesman: also is it ideal to have the number of pages constantly expanding?
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  Neil Cheesman: It is a news site.. so has news updates most days...
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  Neil Cheesman: It isn`t like our website is the BBC or New York Times where old news remains online...
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  Neil Cheesman: I mean... who wants to read about a show opening 5 years ago...
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  Neil Cheesman: it is theatre related - so new shows and cast changing all of the time...
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  Micah Fisher-Kirshner: News isnt my area of focus, but what about the expiration header as a way to automate things? Can one place the expiration header in the page and remove it if the page gets a set amount of traffic?
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  Alan Bleiweiss: Another suggestion - when changing pages to noindex, nofollow, it`s advisable to remove the canonical tag in their page headers, if one previously existed that was self-pointing. Failing to do that is the single biggest cause I find in my audits for Google to ignore at least some portion of the noindex directives.