For example CNN links to /t-shirt/gray/?price=50 page which is noindexed. One can add canonical tag /t-shirt/gray/ alongside with noindex and google may forward CNN link signal to the canonical version.
thanks”
John Mueller Answers Noindex & Canonical Question:
Mueller offered a more absolute answer by affirming that it’s best to pick one or the other, explaining that a noindexed canonical might nor might not be picked up by Google, thereby explaining why he said “maybe” in the 2021 YouTube Video.
He wrote:
“…I’d just pick one (noindex or followed links). Links on a noindexed page can be picked up, but it’s not guaranteed. SEO is often about making your preference very clear and not about maybe’s. Also, it’s helpful to be realistic: sometimes (often) having a good site structure that generally works well for search engines is better than hyper-focusing on links (or any other individual aspect of SEO).”
Mueller’s Answer Explains Use Of Noindex & Canonical
His answer explains a lot and clears up why he hedged in 2021 with a “maybe” while not exactly getting into the details of why Google may or may not pick up a canonical when a noindex rule is invoked.
For those who want a little more detail about why Mueller said the canonical might be picked up, there’s a tweet from 2020 by Google’s Gary Illyes in which he explains the technical reason why Google might see links when there is a noindex in place.
A nerdy detail is that the person who tweeted the question in 2020 was asking about a robots meta noindex with a “follow” directive but the thing is that there is no such thing as a “follow” directive, according to Google’s robots meta tag documentation. The reason there’s no such thing as a “follow” directive is because following links is the default Googlebot behavior.
Gary tweeted:
“something with noindex will never reach the serving index, but we will have the fetched copy for things like link graph calculation.”
A “link graph” calculation is a reference to the (reduced) link graph of websites that is a map of the link relationships between pages and websites.
Screenshot Of Gary Illyes’ Tweet
Read John Mueller’s answer here:
Using noindex with canonical tag?