Should i noindex low/quality duplicate content tag pages?

Question

Google have indexed 300k tag pages of my site, these are automatically generated based on the words on the title of each entry so it's likely to see pages which doesn't make much sense like:

www.example.com/tags/thanks.html 
www.example.com/tags/hello.html 
www.example.com/tags/good.html 

After reading this answer by @John Mueller i suppose that Google would be able to detect duplicate content and show the better version in SERPS, but my fear is the 'low quality' and 'thin content' of these pages and the possibility of a sitewide effect due to Panda.

I'm getting 8000 daily visitors from organic traffic for the tag pages (that is 3% of site traffic)

Would it be a good practice if i put a noindex in order to prevent a penalty and help Googlebot to not waste time crawling?

Answer 1

Most of big sites hit by Google panda, because of low quality of website(not low quality of post, but it is because of indexing tag that is auto generated).

In general, tags is also consider a single webpage, but problem is that, one post have many of tags, so your post title and post description is displayed on multiple tags, and that cause problem about duplicate issue or low quality issue.

So I prefer to use noindex,follow meta tag in your wordpress/CMS tags.

Answer 2

There is a lot of websites which have the same issue as described in your scenario while if you go with answer by @John Mueller. He is already told that it's not a problem in terms of content penalty while it's an issue with which URL to show by Google's algorithms & maybe it won't choose the URL you'd choose. It's also depends upon the amount of duplication as if it's only 2x or 3x then no need of worry too much.