No-indexing thin pages: "sculpting" technique, potential penalty?

[1script]

No-indexing of thin content pages and other pages that cannot/should not be deleted outright has been coming up lately. Often offered as a remedy to Panda. So, given how touchy Google is about anything you do that can potentially affect your ranking, what are the chances that if you start to implement no-index on your site, it will be construed as a sort of "content sculpting" (for lack of a better term) technique, yet another SEO gimmick for which you can then get slapped with yet another penalty. At least with the lower transitional rank, that notorious patent, newly discovered?

I'm drawing a parallel to page rank sculpting whereby adding rel=nofollow was a normal thing to do on links you can't trust (UGC etc) and then all of a sudden it became "PR sculpting", an SEO technique frowned upon by Google?

Does anyone see this as a possibility or is this paranoia firmly setting in?

[tedster]

I vote for paranoia, since it was Google engineers (on their own forum) who recommended noindex as one possible action to take in response to Panda demoted pages.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

A meta noindex tag is appropriate for paginated archives since you don't want 100+ pages with the same or nearly the same title and description competing against each other. Also, no need to add *follow* to the tag since that is the default behavior.

I wouldn't add the tag to pages arbitrarily however, unless they are grouped within a category and the entire category is also not indexed. Login pages, profile pages if they are too similar and privacy policy/terms of use type pages are also good candidates for noindex.

There is no reason to fear the tag(or Google).

[1script]

Tedster, you points are well taken. I do realize this sounds a bit silly but Sgt. K hit this on the head, so hear me out some more, I'll try to explain:

I'm not talking about pages of different taxonomy - tags, categories, various lists and archives, misc pages (login etc.) and such. I've been doing it for 2+ years already with no negative results.

I am talking about distributing the no-index robot meta tags between content pages whereby the only difference between index and noindex is, perhaps, the length of the text or the amount of responses to a question (taking a clue from another thread today). I think that's what the Panda remedies are actually suggesting: review your content pages (same taxonomy) and no-index those that don't pass muster.

Getting back to the PR sculpting analogy, I distinctly remember Matt Cutt's speech on one of those conferences couple years back where his reasoning went like this: "why is the link to Page 1 straight up and the link to Page 2 is a rel=nofollow? Are you trying to mess with our PR assignments and gain an unfair advantage? Here, let me give you a free red sticker. The one with the word "Spammer" on it." (or something to that effect, please don't quote me on the actual wording - it was back in 2009).

The paranoia part is where anything that I can do on my site I would be doing to gain some advantage, at least in the sense of not losing rankings where I don't have to. I think Inquisitors used a similar logic back then... Am I still making no sense?