Dan01 - 5:16 am on Dec 25, 2011 (gmt 0)

Dan01 I would never just delete a page I would 301 the page to another page on the site that has the same or very like content. Do you want 1000 or how many pages you delete 404's. There was a rule a long time ago never just delete a page we call this linkrot, and not something I would do. You can as suggested noindex them but if the pages are duplicate in nature I prefer to 301 them myself

OK, there were a lot of good responses here.

The latest iteration of Panda, according to what I read here, had to do with scraper sites. We were hit at that time.

Up until 2009 we accepted guest posts. There were a lot of them. I am sure those posts appeared on other sites. Perhaps we were viewed as a scraper site? That is what I think is happening now.

Amazingly, we still rank for some pages - but we have a bunch of junk pages too.

NOW HERE ARE MY QUESTIONS:

1) Will Google penalize us for getting rid of (deleting) those junk pages. It is so easy and quick to see if the page got any traffic and checkbox it to delete, rather than 301 or no index.

2) I am still looking for a good list of the pages on OUR site that have links to them. Tedsters site truncated the list at 500 and Webmaster tools truncated the list at 1,000.