Hi everyone,

Long time reader, first time poster.

I have a question regarding having a vast amount of 404 pages weekly. I have just joined this company and a process they put in place was to have the option of users removing their profiles from google index (only implemented in the past couple of months).

Now the way they went about doing this is; if the user said yes then the page is returned as a 404 and only registered users are able to see the profile. Now as we have over 100 million profiles with hundreds of thousands being created almost weekly it is producing 100k plus 404s nearly every week.

I was considering reversing this and just having a noindex, follow meta tag on the profiles if they opt out of the search results. So my question is this:

1. can having this many 404s every other week harm the website (ranks/trust etc)
2. would noindex,follow or even nofollow produce the same results? I have seen instances of a url appearing in the rankings even when robots out because it had links pointing to it. We can not have this happen.
3. is there any other way to go about doing this?

Thanks