In theory as long as the pages you leave on your site are strong content filled and useful then you should in-effect recover from panda because the quality of your site overall would have increased.

"In theory" is right.

I've no-indexed over half the pages on my site. I thought that what was left to index was good quality content. Maybe it's not.

Either way, my site hasn't recovered. It was one of the first to be hit, on 2/24, so maybe Google sees it as needing more than just no-indexing pages.

In theory as long as the pages you leave on your site are strong content filled and useful then you should in-effect recover from panda because the quality of your site overall would have increased.

But that would only be true if you actually removed them.

I've 'removed' over 2K pages from one site after Panda 2.2. I'll have to wait until 2.3 or 3.0 to see if it helped.

I suspect the noindexing is only going to help if the rest of the site is up to par. The noindexed sections were autogenerated, but a lot of the remaining non-autogenerated content is thin.

Panda is pretty complex, so it's likely many changes beyond no-indexing will be necessary.

I'm doing a test on another site to see if Panda will allow one-page sites (just the home page with everything else noindexed), where that page is long and has high value.

Panda may use word count and keyword density to test the thinness and uniqueness of each page, and then compare that to other sites to see if it's really unique.

Repetitive pages will probably still get Pandalized even if the page's main idea and/or content wasn't copied from another site.

In 2011 repetition is out.

In theory as long as the pages you leave on your site are strong content filled and useful then you should in-effect recover from panda because the quality of your site overall would have increased.

But that would only be true if you actually removed them.

Right? I have a section of affiliate content that equals about half my site, it's noindexed sure, but I still link to it at least twice from every other page of my site. Pandalized 2-24, no recovery.

Like you I wonder, can we have stuff like that or not?

Quick update

One page from my Pandalized site has recovered to top position. What I did was deep six all the pages in the directory widgets/ except for the index.html page and one or two pages in the directory. That was noindex, nofollow on about 50 thin pages. The main page that was kept is a decent article (19KB) with original data, graphs, and analysis.

What about noindexing Wordpress category and tag pages, as well as a robots.txt file? Anyone seen a jump after implementing these changes?

Has anyone actually recovered by noindexing pages?

Not that I've heard of on these threads or seen directly. But it is part of a process to get back, I believe.

Just focus on usability and good content on the remaining pages. Remember that Google is comparing your site to what else is out there. If your subject is unique and not just a rewrite of the same subject and/or a "flat" experience you should start to see improvements. Think outside the square of what you can use to reverse back some of those noindexed pages - and not just written content. Panda surely picks up on the code as well which is where UI comes in.

The way out of Panda is to stop thinking about the algorithmn and more about the quality of the user experience. If you start to get a handful of pages looking and doing things better than your competitors, this a seed for a new future from which you can grow new ideas and replace your noindexing pages. The Panda opportunities are all about a fundamental shift in the thinking of the site owner.

Think about how your site can be more entertaining, more useful as a tool, say something useful that is unique. Also consider how you can compete with "brands" who have money to burn on developing the ultimate usability experiences. The beauty of modern technology is it's affordable access to everyone. Think of ways you can apply it to bring back some of those previously low performing pages that you noindexed. I think this is the key.

So in the context of this, yes noindexing pages is part of the process. Do or think of nothing more, and I'd say you will have limited or no success.

What about noindexing Wordpress category and tag pages, as well as a robots.txt file? Anyone seen a jump after implementing these changes?

Why should noindex them? Some of my category pages get 500 visits per day..
I also get visits to pages 2-3-4 of these categories.
+ with a very good bounce rate and page per visit.

I never used Tags and think that if you have categories you should avoid tags but if you have tags don't use categories.

I was at the Searchlove event in London for the past few days and the word on the street was that 404'ing thin pages was vastly superior to no-indexing.

Logically this lines up quite well with the OP.

I can't remember who said it - think it was Rand Fishkin.

Well logically - Just no-indexing them shouldn't really make a difference. They still *know* about the poor quality (in their opinion) pages - so therefore the visitors will still see them.

The only real way to tell G that you are removing them is to actually remove them.

That's what I've done anyway.

I would not bother with noindex. I would rather just remove any pages or put them where google cant find them. Maybe require people to login to see them?