Should I noindex a section thats not really converting?

[pood]

I have 1 section on my site that has 29k pages indexed, most of it is data (college information)

That section hasn't really gotten a lot of traffic the last 4 month (5k from search, I get around 33k/month), the bounce rate is pretty high (70%) and I have a funny feeling it's not really making a lot of money.

If I removed it from the index, would it harm or improve my site?

Here's my logic - since the pages don't receive a lot of traffic and not really converting. Why not remove it from the index (with noindex, I'll still keep the pages since it provides some value). So I can pass more link juice to all the other useful pages on my site.

Right now I have around 65k pages indexed, if I suddenly de-index these pages, would google penalize or lower my authority?

[TheMadScientist]

Why not remove it from the index (with noindex, I'll still keep the pages since it provides some value). So I can pass more link juice to all the other useful pages on my site.

Not sure what that'll do for you, except pass less weight back to the rest of the site? NoIndex pages will still accumulate link weight from every link pointing to them and pass (AFAIK) less weight to the pages they link to, so it seems like it would have the opposite of the desired effect, IMO.

Also, a 'high' bounce rate should probably be looked at in the context of visit time, because it could be people are finding what they are looking for on the page they find in the search engines, which would seem to indicate you and the SEs are doing a good job of getting people to the right place on the site.

3rd if the section of the site makes more money than it costs in hosting to have the traffic it's profitable, so why not cut down some of the internal links to the section rather than NoIndexing it and work to get more links to other sections to increase their performance?

I guess the shorter answer to your question is:
I probably wouldn't...

[AnkitMaheshwari]

IMO, you should also look from the perspective of adding CALL TO ACTION on these pages as that might be a possible reason for high bounce rate.

In any circumstances, removing the pages from index would not be on my list either.