Isn't telling webmasters to noindex 'thin pages' bad for Google?

[silentneedle]

Maybe someone of you could enlighten me. Since panda I was always wondering why Google suggests webmasters to noindex 'thin pages'. Everyone knows that there are plently of good pages which may be thin but exactly what you are looking for. But now, much webmasters noindex such pages in the fear being pandanized until they've added enough text to bloat up their article just to make it 'fleshy' enough, especially ugc sites.

So telling webmasters to noindex those pages hides content from Google, even if they *would* like to show that content to a user (maybe for a keyword which doesn't have any related results), they legally can't. Aren't they shoot in their own foot with that strategy?

[aristotle]

If you think that a page has useful valuable information, and that Google might send a worthwhile amount of traffic to it, then you shouldn't give it a noindex tag. On the other hand, if it's a worthless page that has no chance of getting any traffic from Google, then you should probably noindex it.

So in other words, you should try to judge the potential traffic that the page could get, and decide on thst basis.

[supercyberbob]

I wouldn't listen to anything those monkeys say.

Use your own judgement like aristotle said.

[tangor]

Noindex does not hide the content from G, it just tells G that the content is not intended for the index (serps). There are many reasons to noindex a page and most of them have nothing to do with thin content.