johoney - 10:50 pm on Jan 14, 2010 (gmt 0)

My site has a content syndication arrangement with a very authoritative and well known news service.

We get a daily feed of articles that are published on my site and after an initial period (around 1 week) the articles are removed from my site.

We find that search engines index the content and (no surprise) get a 404 when its removed from our site.

Is it better to meta noindex/follow these articles so as not to annoy search engines with lots of missing pages? My feeling is that search engines could claim that we are giving searchers a bad experience if they see the link in SERPS but then get a 404.

Cheers - JoC
p.s. donate to Haiti relief fund on doctorswithoutborders or Red Cross