How to de-value/unemphasise specific pages

[Karma]

I have a number of pages (lots) on my site that are "thin on content". I don't consider them useless, but thin on content - yes.

How should I be handling these?

Obviously if they are thin on content, the search engines will know - but I don't want my good pages to be taking a hit because of the them and I don't want the "thin content" pages removed from the index either.

Is there anything I can do?

[tedster]

Maybe nothing. What do you mean by "thin on content"? Panda's intention is to demote SHALLOW content - even if that content is hundreds of words long.

If by "thin" you are only talking about word count, and you feel these pages are useful enough to be indexed - then I would not do anything unless the site seems to have taken a big hit from Panda.

[Karma]

Thin as in word-count.

I have been hit pretty hard by Panda, maybe 25%.

Many of my 'good' pages dropped significantly on April 11th (only been monitoring since April 1st) and I was hit by Panda v1 too.

[tedster]

Can you describe the situation in more detail? How low is the word count on these pages, why are they important, why do they need to be so short, etc. Because as far as I know, if they are really the prime cause of your traffic loss, then your only choice is get rid of them (404,410) or noindex them. Even for sites that have done so, recovery seems rare.

I suppose you could make sure that you don't link to those pages any more than is absolutely necessary - but I wouldn't hold a lot of hope for that approach.

[potentialgeek]

@Karma

I was in a similar position with one site. On many pages I wanted to keep online I added this tag:

<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,follow">

Still waiting to see if it lifted the Panda problem.