Comments

1. Thicken the pages. If the site hasn't been hit with the Panda bat and you have some good links, then make the pages worth linking to. Leave the panicing over nofollowing low quality pages to the people who've been impacted by Panda and, once we start seeing results from those sites, start making recommendations.

   Comment by Damon - May 3, 2011 @ 3:39pm
2. I would certainly not create any new low value pages, but the concept of no indexing low value pages does not seen like an appropriate step. It seems too artificial. I'm skeptical that anything that may be construed as artificial will help with search rankings (but sadly have no quantitative evidence to support my suppostion). Either the pages offer value to vistitors or they don't. If they offer value to site visitors and are throwing off ad revenue, then I would not add a no-index tag. If they do not offer value to visitors, then either improve them or remove them and 301 redirect them (as long as they are not producing significant ad revenue - if so, the question becomes tricky). You probably need to gather more information regarding paid links before moving forward.

   Comment by Randy Pickard - May 3, 2011 @ 3:45pm
3. I'd consider doing a 301 redirect for those pages. Try and point them to some other relevant internal page. Any you cant find a relevant page for, point them to the home page as a default. The thin pages disappear, you maintain much of the link equity from those internal links, now pointing to higher quality pages. However, if those links are paid, or the footprint looks like that, and you're worried about getting slapped....? Contact them and see about switching up some anchor text to add some variability and not have as much exact keyword matching.

   Comment by Stever - May 3, 2011 @ 4:50pm
4. Or, keep the pages and update the content to something original. Maybe move ad placements to put a bit more focus on that content.

   Comment by Stever - May 3, 2011 @ 5:01pm
5. I'm backing up the first suggestion. Find a way to beef up the content. But, curious about noindexing them. How would Google treat that? By just noindexing vs disallowing them, they're still crawling the pages. Would they recognize those pages as presenting little value and could the site still be hurt as a whole because of that? Or does the noindex strip their recognition of that? I've never tested this, so I don't know. Do you?

   Comment by Rhea Drysdale - May 6, 2011 @ 2:25pm
6. How do these inbound links compare to competitors', i.e. are they succeeding with similar links? If other sites have shades of grey in there, I'd be inclined to not worry about that so much (easy for me to say I appreciate). I'd echo other's comments re. expanding the content. Perhaps look to add even more links to these pages from more diverse sources.

   Comment by Sharif - May 6, 2011 @ 6:35pm
7. I have gathered from the post and comments that you need to scale since there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of these keyword + location type pages. So improving the page's content is not an option as it is probably not within budget or not feasible due to the scale. You can 301 these pages or just remove them if you are worried about the 301ing of a thin page negatively impacting the page they are pointed to. As for the links, you should use them for co-citation. Simply contact the webmasters and have them change the destination URLs to point to an existing external linking page. Maybe a profile page for the business on a high authority site? Or a press release? Basically pick a page to point those paid links to that is already ranking for any semantically relevant terms. This way you shield the client site from any potential penalties, and if there is any authority still being passed through those paid links then you'll still get that. Clients do not always like to just kill links that they've already paid for and this may help your cause if that is the case too.

   Comment by Miguel @ SEO Consultant - May 9, 2011 @ 11:18am