JamesB - 5:27 pm on May 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

i have used a combination of ways to remove certain pages post panda

410 gone for page i simply want to remove and will never bring back

noindex - for pages I will improve later (but who knows if G will take these into a quality assessment - if they did every WP blog with tags and cats that are noindex would be affected ?

WMT - complete removal of a directory to delete directories / section of the site i do not wish to bring back.

I have been waiting a long time to have pages removed from Gs index and one possibility i was considering is removing all my indexed wordpress tags and archive pages through WMT directory removal and then adding the noindex,follow tag to the page afterwards and removing the block from robots.txt

Im not sure if the above would send the right signal out to Google though but it seems like a quicker way than waiting for the noindex tag i have added to these pages to kick in.