pageoneresults - 12:53 pm on Apr 29, 2011 (gmt 0)

So what we're telling Google is:

1) I respect your search engine and user-agent guidelines and don't wish to include this page in your results - yet.

So should pages like "terms", "privacy", "disclaimers", "contact" and perhaps even "about", be "noindexed"?. (Remember Google will still crawl these pages!)

Terms, Privacy and Disclaimers - yes. Contact and About - no. Certain documents just don't meet the criteria of being indexworthy. Let's say that Google have a cap on how many documents it will index from your website at any given time. You have 100,000 docs available. Google only wants 75,000 of them. Maybe those 25,000 are intermediary drill down pages e.g. shopping cart structure. In this instance, you'd probably noindex those documents inbetween as they really aren't something you want the visitor landing on from a search as they still have one or two more clicks to go. I'd be willing to wager a bet that landing on a category page is a contributor to high bounce rates.

Category pages with pagination? Usually I noindex them, those are for the visitor when they are on the site and not something I really want them to land on from a search result. My goal has always been to put the visitor right where they need to be. If that means removing certain pages from appearing in the index, I have no qualms with doing that.