mslina2002 - 12:12 pm on Jun 24, 2011 (gmt 0)

Where in WMT can you see penalized pages?

When Panda 1 hit, VF wrote a great article on it. She gives examples on how to find these pages. Lots of good info and ideas there on where to look. [searchengineland.com...]

How did your conversion rates behave with that improvement?

Conversion rates have dropped because the datafeed pages are my money keyword pages. The 20% of the site that is left is the "informational" content part that draws in the traffic but many visitors are not in the buying phase yet. The site targets two main type of visitors in the buying life cycle. So the plan is to add those pages back in by allowing only selective indexing, updated content, meta tags, descriptions, etc.

Is a large scale "no-index" not likely to throw up some flags - especially if it doesn't follow the normal behaviour of your site?

Don't think so. It took months before G crawled all those pages and it's still not done yet. Especially since I experienced a major crawl right before Panda1 hit. Many of those pages were from pagination so the first page is index,follow while the other subsequent were noindex,follow. Google can still crawl, see them, and pass link juice.