Downside to noindex?

[realmaverick]

After revisiting the structure of my website after several years, I'm finding more and more absolutely useless stuff indexed. I want them deindexed and claim back the link juice and crawl allowance.

An example, new user signs up, it appears in the timeline with their username hyperlinked, Google follows this to their empty profile. That then links to several empty pages, where their content will be, should they create any. Of course many many users don't.

I've now un-hyperlinked the username in this instance, removed the links in the profile if no content exists and I've added noindex, follow to the proceeding pages.

I hate using these tags, just as I hated using nofollow way back when. But sometimes, it seems necessary.

Is their any downside to what I've done with the noindex, follow? Is Google likely to give a crap that I've just told it, that it's not to index half a million pages?

[pageoneresults]

I have observed a ranking site getting de-ranked in SERPs due to high-usage of noindex tag on there non-required pages, except there main node/thread/content/article/topic pages.

If you're saying that the use of noindex caused that site to get deranked overall, that would be a concern. I've always been an avid fan of noindex for documents that I don't want users landing on after performing a search. Also, I don't want anyone scraping site: searches and finding my entire site indexed.

I've seen no ill effects of using noindex and/or noindex, nofollow where appropriate. When dealing with larger sites, there are quite a few intermediary documents that I feel don't need to be indexed. If a user landed on one of them, they'd have to click once or twice more to find what they were looking for. My thinking is to just remove that hodgepodge from the equation and provide the bot a direct indexing path to the primary content. All those directory style listings that are paginated get the noindex treatment. It's the click after that which counts. The final destination.

Not available in SERPs now?

It's possible that they overcooked things and removed "too much" from the equation, who knows...

[Webnauts]

@pageoneresults you said: "I've seen no ill effects of using noindex and/or noindex, nofollow where appropriate."

I am also an avid fan of the noindex meta tag, but not of the nofollow.

I do not understand what you mean talking about appropriate use of noindex,nofollow.

Personally I never use the "nofollow" meta robots directive, because it creates dangling or node pages. Or did the patent change and I missed the update?

Can you please clarify?

[pageoneresults]

Can you please clarify?

Not many documents get the noindex, nofollow treatment. There are certain documents that are "user only" information and do not need to be calculated in the mix. Login pages, privacy policies, shipping terms, etc. Anything not of value from a indexing/crawling perspective.

[Webnauts]

And want happens to the PageRank the links carry, when they arrive to a dead end (dangling/node) page?

[pageoneresults]

And want happens to the PageRank™ the links carry, when they arrive to a dead end (dangling/node) page?

Honestly? I don't know. Also, I'm not concerned with PageRank™ in this scenario. In fact, I was just Tweeting the other day that I haven't seen the little green bar in over 2 years. We don't even discuss PageRank™ around my neck of the woods. It is a misleading metric in many instances.

Since these areas are usually not heavily linked to from within the primary areas of the site, any PageRank™ flowing that way will be minimal and of no concern from my perspective. I don't want those documents to be in the calculation - period.

As I stated above, not many documents get the noindex, nofollow. The majority of my use is noindex.

Does anyone other than Google "really know" what happens with PageRank™ ? It's all a guessing game for the rest of us. ;)

You do have me thinking about this.

[Webnauts]

First of all, I do not understand what are you talking about. In my entire career I never discussed about that useless and ridiculous PageRank toolbar.

I am sorry if I misunderstood that the discussion here is about the PageRank toolbar. If it is, that is not what I was referring to.

I never heard or read that links pointing to dead end (dangling or node) pages carry less PageRank than other. If this is again a new pantent, then again I assume I have missed something.

Can you please clarify?

[aakk9999]

I never heard or read that links pointing to dead end (dangling or node) pages carry less PageRank than other. If this is again a new pantent, then again I assume I have missed something.

These links do not carry less PageRank than other - they carry the same proportion of the PageRank to the page that is nofollowed, but after this the PageRank evaporates. It flows to the page that is nofollowed, but cannot flow out of it to circulate back to the rest of the site.