phranque - 12:07 pm on Mar 6, 2013 (gmt 0)

Nah, it's been tested quite a few times and noindex pages pass link weight.

however, this won't help the parameter-free version of the url accumulate PR.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won't be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn't make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages.

the noindexed urls (with parameters) will accumulate PR and pass PR to linked and followed urls on the noindexed pages.
since the url-with-parameters is noindexed, the link rel canonical element in that document will be ignored.