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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.

Hi Andreas, are you sure..? According to this article on Moz:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

"The rel=canonical tag passes the same amount of link juice (ranking power) as a 301 redirect"

Did John Mueller say that the tag does not pass link juice? Do you have a link to the hangout recording so that I can check it out..?

Thanks

I'll add this article by Rand that I came across too. I'm busy testing the solution presented in it:

https://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo

In summary, 404 all dead pages with a good custom 404 page so as to not waste crawl bandwidth. Then selectively 301 those dead pages that have accrued some good link value.

Thanks Donna/Tammy for pointing me in this direction..

Thanks Donna, good points..

We return a hard 404, so it's treated correctly by google. We are just looking at this from a SEO point of view now to see if there's any way to reclaim this lost link juice.

Your point about looking at the value of those incoming links is a good one. I suppose it's not worth making google crawl 100,000 more pages for the sake of a few links. We've just starting seeing these pop up in Moz Analytics as link opportunities, and we can see them as 404's in site explorer too. There are a few hundred of these incoming links that point to a 404, so we feel this could have an impact.

I suppose we could selectively 301 any higher value links to the home page.. It will be an administrative nightmare, but doable..

How do others tackle this problem. Does everyone just hard 404 a page when that loses the link juice for incoming links to it..?

Thanks

Thanks Sandi, I did..  It's a great article and it answered many questions for me, but i couldn't really get clarity on my last two questions above..

We have a situation on twiends where a number of our 'dead' user pages have generated links for us over the years. Our options are to 404 them, 301 them to the home page, or just serve back the home page with a canonical tag.

We've been 404'ing them for years, but i understand that we lose all the link juice from doing this. Correct me if I'm wrong?

Our next plan would be to 301 them to the home page. Probably the best solution but our concern is if a user page is only temporarily down (under review, etc) it could be permanently removed from the index, or at least cached for a very long time.

A final plan is to just serve back the home page on the old URL, with a canonical tag pointing to the home page URL. This is quick, retains most of the link juice, and allows the URL to become active again in future. The problem is that there could be 100,000's of these.

Q1) Is it a problem to have 100,000 URLs pointing to a primary with a rel=canonical tag? (Problem for Google?)

Q2) How long does it take a canonical duplicate page to become unique in the index again if the tag is removed? Will google recrawl it and add it back into the index? Do we need to use WMT to speed this process up?

Thanks

I'll add this article by Rand that I came across too. I'm busy testing the solution presented in it:

https://moz.com/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo

In summary, 404 all dead pages with a good custom 404 page so as to not waste crawl bandwidth. Then selectively 301 those dead pages that have accrued some good link value.

Thanks Donna/Tammy for pointing me in this direction..