Pjman - 7:24 pm on Apr 13, 2011 (gmt 0)

Blocking “Low Quality” Content Matt reiterated that enough low quality content on a site could reduce rankings for that site as a whole. Improving the quality of the pages or removing the pages altogether are typically good ways to fix that problem, but a few scenarios need a different solution. For instance, a business review site might want to include a listing for each business so that visitors can leave reviews, but those pages typically have only business description information that’s duplicated across the web until visitors have reviewed it. A question/answer site will have questions without answers… until visitors answer them. In cases like this, Google’s Maile Ohye recommended using a <meta name=robots content=noindex> on the pages until they have unique and high-quality content on them. She recommends this over blocking via robots.txt so that search engines can know the pages exist and start building history for them so that once the pages are no longer blocked, they can more quickly be ranked appropriately.

From: Lessons Learned at SMX West: Google’s Farmer/Panda Update, White Hat Cloaking, And Link Building

Mar 12, 2011 at 1:36pm ET by Vanessa Fox