How to Manage "Dynamic" Category Pages for Panda

[levo]

I've a couple of categorized event pages, that get emptied time to time. I'm not sure what to do with those pages, should I 301 them to the main listings page as long as they are empty, or should I use noindex.

What happens if I use noindex and an event for that category comes up? AFAIK noindex would cause a slower crawl rate for that page, and won't recover quick enough..

[Shatner]

I disallowed most of mine in the robots.txt, no idea if that was the right thing to do, but I'm kind of at my wits end with Panda.

[goodroi]

Look at the cost/benefit. How much traffic do you stand to lose each year if you permanently block these pages vs. how much easier it is for the rest of your site to perform in the Google serps.

Sometimes it makes sense to take a small loss on deep pages to boost your money pages and sometimes the loss is too big and the benefit is too small to the money pages.

Maybe you can get creative and figure out how to add some evergreen events to the pages to make them robust enough to always be alive.

[netmeg]

I have the same situation; don't want to get rid of these pages because there are a lot of backlinks over the years (think a city page that lists all events for that city) So I've added some logic that if there are no current events for the page, strips off the ads and uses some alternative content - admittedly thin, but usually serves the purpose for the few weeks until another event rolls around. I've never taken a search engine hit on them (even through Panda) but if it looks like I'm going to, then I'll add a temporary noindex too, to be removed once an event is added.

These pages get bookmarked and shared a lot, and the empty page times are short lived, so I'm hoping even if Google ends up not liking them, the users will keep them reasonably hot.