Canonical from NOINDEX,FOLLOW pages - Bad idea?

[bjs2010]

Hi,

We have an extensive online shop in Magento - to ensure that some of the pages with query strings are not indexed, we implemented a conditional NOINDEX,FOLLOW so that it will stop indexing any pages that have querystrings on it -

We do need to use Canonical also - for other reasons - so my question is:

If you have a page that is NOINDEX,FOLLOW and it has a rel canonical pointing to original, would it transfer that NOINDEX,FOLLOW to the main original page causing it problems?

Thanks!

[TomRayner]

Hi there

No, the canonical will not pass the meta robots directive to the original page, so you're safe there.

What you're effectively doing is using two ways to prevent duplication - the canonical will instruct web crawlers not to index versions of the URL with query strings, just as the noindex,nofollow tags will.

Nothing wrong with using two methods simultaneously to do this - always a good idea to be safe - and so the end result will be that the URLs with query strings will be very, very unlikely to be indexed.

[Keszi]

There was a very good article from Dr. Pete about HTTP status.

Canonicals do not transfer information like noindex, follow.

What they transfer is the incoming "link juice" to the original version of the page. So basically it counts as a redirect for Search Engines without redirecting the visitor, which means it won't be indexed (the non-original version) and all the link juice that the page got will be transferred to the original version.

I hope it helps,

Istvan