Valuable and non-valuable pages

Only valuable vs. numerous less valuable pages decision

[Nino_D]

Every web site has numerous paths to page X.

Lets take for example a directory. To get to page X one can follow various paths:

1. Home page (A) >> category (B) >> subcategory (C) >> page X
2. Home page (A) >> category2 (B2) >> subcategory2 (C2) >> page X
3. Home page (A) >> category3 (B3) >> subcategory3 (C3) >> page X
4. Home page (A) >> Search results (S) >> page X
5. Home page (A) >> Search results2 (S2) >> page X
6. etc.

First question is:

What is more important?
Having 100s od pages of various not-important similar pages that lead to one important page X
category2 (B2) >> subcategory2 (C2) >>
category3 (B3) >> subcategory3 (C3) >>
...
indexed by Google

OR

Having ONLY important pages and ONE path indexed by Google
Home page (A) >> subpage (B) >>subsubpage (C) >> page X
and ALL OTHER not-important pages
subpage2 (B2) >> subsubpage2 (C2) >>
blocked using meta tag
<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">

In your experience does Google appriciate more if web site has fewer but only valuable pages, or prefers when website has 1.000s of pages, but with no real value content but leading to valuable pages.

Second question is regarding <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow">
Does this tag tells google:
Follow links to important pages and take this page into calculation of links, but dont use them for search results.
Also do not count page as possible duplicate content.
Only web pages tagged with content="index,follow" consider for results from my web site.

[tedster]

I'd say having many pages definitely does help, but not if they're really thin. Having some value is important. Although the appearance of value can still be autogenerated to a degree, it's geting tougher.

As for question #2, I think you've got the "noindex,follow" combination nailed down rather well.