text: The good thing with that is perhaps they detected noindex pages, they would not be looking at the core quality algorithms, at least by my understanding. If you are going to go back for a couple of months or even years and you were trying to fix Panda-related issues, noindex-ing work just fine. That’s why we all started using it, let’s say probably more aggressively. We also have sites where we ended up noindex-ing 95% of old URLs because they were either thin or just bad quality. They didn’t get any organic traction. If you just stuff them in the index, that’s probably not the way to do it.
  Somewhere, which you’re right on some of the points if you look at faceted navigations, probably your biggest problem that they have. Another one was actually a very large UGC forum situation. Most very popular forums have something like an off-topic section and it was just a whole bunch of not great stuff in there, let’s put it that way. We ended up going full noindex on this other board and some other off-topic forms as well to just keep the really juicy UGC indexed. That works quite well, I have to say.
  I do understand where you’re coming from and if you look at it from a resource usage perspective, if you turn it around, what I just said would mean that for that site, they would have wasted 90%-ish of their time crawling sites just to see, “Well, this is noindex. You should be careful about my resources.” It’s a bit of a hand act problem. What to do first and what to do last. This is why I liked the combination of a disallow, noindex, and robots.txt which, thank you Google, is now not working anymore, which is a bit of a shame. That solved a bit of the issue.
  One of the biggest misses is setting aside log files. It's so important because it lets you know how bots are crawling a site. Click To Tweet
  Going back to what would you do, for example for faceted navigation, I would rather look at a post reader like get pattern. JavaScript in the forefront, so that does not even make a real link in the markup, but rather something that requires an additional JavaScript and then transforms a day for a span into something clickable so that the crawler doesn’t even run into it. That does not really help you if they already knew about the other 10 million noindex URLs. I suppose that’s the way I would probably look at it.
  Is that even a long term solution if Google’s getting better and better at executing JavaScript? Eventually, be able to execute the JavaScript in a way that the user is going to get the same experience at the user wall and will become a clickable link?
  For that, you would have to see how they are going to continue with Chrome and their capabilities for now. One of the things that they’re not doing is they’re not executing any user interaction. If you would use the JavaScript that only will be fired when an event like onscroll or something like that, that’s going to be dozens more that they’re not using is being executed, then right now that works quite well. It’s anyone’s guess how that is going to happen, it is going to last.