Thanks Chris, that's an excellent insight..

We've actually started to deindex all the 'thin' pages, but it will unfortunately take months for Google to recrawl all. And I think a restructuring is in order as you say. We're busy putting a 'learning' section together (similar to moz but much smaller), so we're going to feature this more prominently too.

I think you're correct about interaction. We receive a lot of organic traffic to these thin pages and people bounce quite quickly. We used to value this traffic, but now I think it just hurts us because of quick bounces. So we're addressing this now with deindexing, better titles and descriptions, and on-page elements to improve interaction.

Two years ago we never had these thin user pages indexed and our main landing pages dominated the rankings.

Have you seen any correlations recently between bounce rate and rankings slip...?

Thanks Paddy, great response, that clarifies things for me..

I don't think we've picked up any penalties because the majority of links look fine, they're just off-topic. But as a risk mitigation we've started to clear out the users and disavow the domains that look bad. It's unlikely we're receiving any real link juice from these spammy sites anyway..

Hi, yes exactly..

Our site provides each user with a profile page that shows their latest tweets, photos, etc. So a lot of users like to list it as a home page in various places. eg:

http://twiends.com/cnn

Hi Peter, thanks for the response, that looks like a good doc, I'll read through it now..

Please note, I don't have any way to remove the backlinks to our site or make them nofollow. They exist on 10,000 other websites.. The only thing I can do is disavow them, but this is not what the disavow tool is designed for..

Did you perhaps misread what I was asking..?

Many thanks

Dave

We have received a lot of backlinks over the years by users putting links on their websites to their home pages on our site, eg:

our.domain/user1

our.domain/user2

…

our.domain/user100000

There are 10’s of thousands of these backlinks, all natural, but many of them come from blogs that are completely outside of our niche. Only a small percentage of our backlinks 1% to 5% could actually be coming from pages related to our niche, the other 95%+ could be users just linking to their home pages.

Could this really hurt us..? We have 1000’s of backlinks related to our niche, yet we’ve noticed that some competitors with less than 50 backlinks can outrank us for certain keywords..

Also related, we’ve noticed these user links popping up on a lot of spammy sites, directories, etc. We didn’t create them but we’re disavowing them now to be safe. So this could also be hitting our rankings.