Low Quality Pages: Block with Robots Meta tag or send 404 error?

[hydseo]

Hi All,

My site is hit by panda 4.0. I have found number of low quality pages. These low quality pages i have blocked with robots meta tag. As per panda 4.0 blocking css or Java may site hit but i have blocked pages this may also hit the website quality. Blocking low quality pages with robots meta tag and sending to 404 pages which one helps?

Please give me your advices...

[lucy24]

I hope you are not planning to serve a 404 to search engines while keeping the page available to humans.

There exist weird, convoluted circumstances where something like this, probably with a 410, really is appropriate. But it shouldn't be a first choice.

When you say "block with robots meta tag" do you mean noindex? I hope so, because that's generally a better approach than a robots.txt block.

[hydseo]

Hi lucy24

i am blocking with noindex meta tag huge number of pages. Restrict Google these pages may cause hit panda to my domain? It healthy or not using noindex meta tag for low quality pages in Google point of view.

[Robert Charlton]

hydseo - If the pages are low quality, why are you wanting to hold onto them? Are they in some ways valuable to users? If they are in any way useful, why would you want to 404 them?

I know that some SEOs think that sites with more pages are better for SEO, but IMO it's generally just the opposite. In many of the sites I see that have problems, the problems are caused by having too many superfluous pages.

While there are reasons why you might want to keep some noindexed pages, in general I'd use noindex as a temporary strategy only, until I could either improve the noindexed pages or get rid of them.