Robert_Charlton - 7:54 pm on Jul 23, 2010 (gmt 0)

Can putting listing in noindex cause this minus fifty penalty?

Not that I'm aware of.

While this thread has been going on, my indexed pages have gone up three times after putting those listings in noindex. And this is the third time i am seeing this happen.

Again, if this is cause and effect, this is interesting news. Apparently, though, the outcome of what you've done isn't quite yet clear.

I haven't felt that noindex would have anything to do with your crawl issues, and if it did expand your crawl budget, that would be new and useful information to me. I still think crawl budget is a structural issue, not to be controlled either by noindex or nofollow. I was strongly suggesting, though, that nofollow would most likely screw up the internal flow of your PageRank.

I'm wondering whether you by any chance have also used robots.txt to keep these listing pages out of the index. IMO, robots.txt can cause a lot of problems in the wrong hands, and it's definitely not my method of choice for sculpting PageRank.

Pages blocked by robots.txt can be a black hole for PageRank. As Shaddows points out, links from such blocked pages will not be followed because Google doesn't see them. Blocking a page by robots.txt will also disable the robots meta tag for the page it's on.

If you have used robots.txt to get rid of the listing pages, this may be a source of your problems. Otherwise, you might want to look at other issues on your site and to start another thread about those particular problems. I don't see how it could be a noindex problem.

PS: I see you have started a new thread about your -50 problems.... [webmasterworld.com...]