If a page has a NOINDEX tag on it, how much PageRank does it have? The intuitive answer would be “None”. How can a page that is not indexed have PageRank? Wouldn’t it be treated like a dangling link and disregarded during PageRank calculations?

Apparently not. Matt Cutts states on seomoz:

Does a link from a page with meta robots=”noindex, follow” carry less weight? no weight?

For Google, I believe such links would carry the same weight as normal links on regular pages.

Hmmm. Does he mean that the unindexed page actually has a PageRank? Or does he mean that the zero Pagerank that the unindexed page has would be divided out among the links on the page, giving nothing to each? I wonder …

One thing’s for sure … if “NOINDEX, FOLLOW” works as implied, it’s a great way to inject spammy content and links.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 5:57 pm and is filed under Crawling and Indexing, Google, Links, Search Engines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.