To index or no-index

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

• 
  Steve Gerencser: I don`t care personally. Google already knows that those pages have nearly no value for users so they tend to not crawl or index very heavily. There are some strict technical SEOs that think the links to those pages should be no-followed to conserve whatever pagerank there may be on the linking page. But since those links tend to be in the footer anyway (almost no value) again, I don`t stress over it.
• 
  Edwin Jonk: I would noindex thank you pages. However customers might want to find information about the delivery or customer service in general. So I would say index them.
• 
  Kristine Schachinger: Index in general. Google looks for those items as evidence of a legitimate business.
• 
  Bill Slawski: Google said in the reasonable surfer patent that they likely wouldn`t send much PageRank to pages such as a terms of service page. There`s no need to nofollow pages like these.
• 
  Bill Slawski: "Systems and methods consistent with the principles of the invention may provide a reasonable surfer model that indicates that when a surfer accesses a document with a set of links, the surfer will follow some of the links with higher probability than others. This reasonable surfer model reflects the fact that not all of the links associated with a document are equally likely to be followed. Examples of unlikely followed links may include "Terms of Service" links, banner advertisements, and links unrelated to the document." Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=9, 305, 099.PN.&OS=PN/9, 305, 099&RS=PN/9, 305, 099
• 
  Alan Bleiweiss: Site privacy? Useless for SEO. Return policies? Critical for SEO. So the answer is, it depends.
• 
  Bill Slawski: Let Google index crawl and index those. They aren`t going to use up too much PageRank doing it, and it doesn`t likely matter if you aren`t the highest ranking site in the world for "terms of service" or "Privacy Policy". I do remember having a site that ranked 14th for "blue arrow". I told the client that they could remove that particular alt text for that image. Nobody was ever going to look for it. It was better making that alt="". :)
• 
  Peter Mead: My $0.02 just let google crawl and index.