Kenichi Suzuki asked Google’s John Mueller an SEO question that got an interesting response. The question was “I’m curious about this thread. If page A has noindex and rel=canonical pointing to Page B, are the signals of A transferred to B?” John replied, “I don’t think that’s defined.”
Here are those tweets:
I don’t think that’s defined.
— ???? johnmu.xml (personal) ???? (@JohnMu) May 26, 2022
You’d think the answer would be something Google has defined? I mean, you’d think a noindex on page A that has a canonical to page B, would not pass signals? I mean, doesn’t Google have to index the page to see the canonical and then it also has to index the page to see the noindex. But still, wouldn’t that cancel out everything?
I guess it depends on other factors. Maybe sometimes google will pass the signals on those pages and sometimes not?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
