Too many indexed pages, do they hurt, how to fix?

[sailingrabbit]

I can't for the life of me get the number of indexed pages down to below 10,000, which is what we have. If you do a "site:" search for www 2mcctv com you'll see we have like 189,000 pages showing up as indexed.

A) How big of a deal is this, really, assuming that these aren't duplicate pages? If they are just junk pages that we've been attempting to have de-indexed, would they hurt us?

B) How can we get these pages de-indexed?

Thanks

[serkantkar]

Check HTML improvements section at Google Webmaster Tools. If these are duplicate pages from your site it should tell you about URLs identical in terms of title and description.

[eeyipes]

Something I read somewhere about junk pages bringing down a site went something like this ...

Imagine you have 5 pages that make up your site, and they are graded for quality from 1-100.

page A --- excellent score of 95
page B --- pretty good, score of 85
pages C, D, and E --- garbage, score of 10

Average it all out for a total website score of 42 out of 100. (sucks!)

Now whether it really works like that or no, I have no clue. But it changed the way I think about allowing junk pages to just hang around and exist.