Hi,

I think it depends on the site, but my initial thoughts are that there probably isn't a lot of value to having those pages at all. Imagine the site grew to 50X the size it is now, would it make sense to have those pages? By that point, the site would have more thin/no indexed pages than new useful ones.

I think it's important to think from a user point of view. Just because you add noindex doesn't mean Google will take the page out of the index in a hurry. That means there is a lot of potential for people to still find you in Google, arrive on an expired ad, have a bad experience and leave. What about trying to do something a bit more useful like redirecting them to a closely matched product category above? Even doing that might be confusing to users unless you have an overlay explaining that the product is no longer available, so you are redirecting them to a different page.

Craig

I've had a look at this in a fair amount of depth but I still can't get it working. I think there are a few things at play here:

• Google documentation and Schema.org documentation disagree. Google says that location must be a place, Schema.org say it can be place, address or text. So your HTML could technically be correct according to schema.org docs and still show an error in the Google tool.
• I think on some level event probably isn't the right property. The documentation says: "An event happening at a certain time and location...". I know that doesn't help you, just thinking out loud.
• This might be worth thinking about: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/53885/which-schema-org-type-should-be-used-for-webinars - but I don't think it will help with rich snippets if that's what you're after.
• This page gets rich snippets despite not having location, maybe just try the same approach and ignore the testing tool if it works in the SERPS

Sorry I couldn't be more help. I'll add this reply to the Moz page too for the benefits of others.

Hi Landon,

The "site:" operator is probably what you're looking for. To use Bob's example of finding questions about SEO on Yahoo answers, it would be:

"site:uk.answers.yahoo.com SEO"

I hope this helps.

Hi, the higher up the architecture the links are pointing to, the more pages the authority has the potential to influence if. For example building links to the homepage will also help any pages that it links to. Building links to one page only will have a larger impact on that particular page but won't benefit others as much. Does this make sense?

I hope this answers your question, unfortunately I don't know of any case studies since it can't really be compared. I'm still not 100% sure of the question if I'm honest.

Craig

Hi Mike, just to be clear on what Thomas is suggesting, as I think he might be getting mixed up between noindex and robots.txt.

If you simply add noindex,nofollow to a bunch of pages, this could still get you in trouble. Noindex doesn't mean DO NOT CRAWL, it means DO NOT INDEX. There's a big difference.

If something has noindex, Google can still crawl that content but they won't put it in the search results.

The only way to completely make sure that Google won't crawl content is by blocking it in robots.txt or in your case putting it behind a username and password.

So to answer your question, yes it's fine as long as it's behind a login, Google can't punish you for it since they can't see it.

I hope this helps,

Craig