Use fix 404, NoIndex & 301 redirects in farmer/Panda

The farmer/Panda Google update hit and 40% said that they are affected by the update.

We documented advice how to fix the problem if you one of the pages of this update were affected. But in particular, what do you do with low quality content?

Do 404 pages so that they are gone forever? Use these pages to higher quality content pages 301 redirect? Do the pages to noindex? The answer is that it depends on.

Google's JohnMu made it quite clear, in a Google Webmaster help, if you a 404 vs should use a noindex vs. a 301 redirect. In short, 404 planning pages, that you do not have the setting. You can create the pages noindex, are the current low quality and if you improve the quality of the content on these pages, you can remove the NOINDEX. If you have any of the sites you use the low-quality pages redirect and then a 301 redirect.

Here is how John put it:

Remove all pages that you do not want to be sure more. Let return 404 (and make a great 404 page, so that your users get, where they were headed, or relatives can find something). See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=93641 Yes, these pages show find up as crawl errors in webmaster tools, but that's OK - it should. You are not the rest of your site crawling, indexing or ranking affect. Return the 404 pages is fine and can be expected. HTTP result code can be a little faster, with a 410 ("gone"), but as a whole, you must have the difference, 404 is ok.You have products that you can merge, you then use a 301 redirect from the alternative versions. If you can use a 301 redirect, you use the rel = canonical link Element.Wenn you have entries that you want to write, then use a noindex meta tag sounds like a good solution. I would keep (the URLs in the sitemap file you want to Google content index, to them, so that the noindex meta tag is seen) and make sure that they are not allowed by the robots.txt file. As Cristina said, which means that more resources, treat your website must crawl these pages, but I suppose, because we have them in the past burden is not a problem, or?

Once this is done, said John it may take some time for the changes to take in Google. John said:

Keep in mind that any changes that you make in this context when, will influence the algorithms. We have to crawl and index your content updated (or removed), and can take a little time. The better your site URL structure is (minimum duplicate content & easy to crawl), the faster we will be able to update things, but I would expect certainly night changes. It took a while for your website to get where it is now on, and it will take a while for these updates to be displayed. On the other hand, time, that is also really refresh your content & site structure too:-).

There are some really solid advice in the thread.