"noindex" URLs not in index have PageRank

How does this happen?

[Patrick Taylor]

The pages in question have had <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> in the document head since they were first published. They have TB PageRank.

The URLs are all similar to:

ht*p://www.domain.com/topic?parameter=abc
ht*p://www.domain.com/topic?parameter=xyz

... and their content is more or less identical (which is why the meta tag has been added, to avoid the risk of duplicates).

There's another page ht*p://www.domain.com/topic - the master version, so to speak - which also contains the same content but does not have the parameters or the meta tag, and that is in Google's index. It has slightly higher TB PageRank than the ones with the parameters.

The only explanation I can think of for how a non-indexed URL has PR is that all these pages are seen by Google as "variants" of the same page. I've always thought, perhaps wrongly, that these are all different URLs.

[hvacdirect]

If there are links to it, a page will get PageRank. Doesn't have to be in the index, cached, or have anything on it.

I bought a domain and blocked all crawlers via robots.txt that very day. No crawler that obeys robots txt, which would include Google, has ever seen the site. It has pagerank,because it was blogged about.

[jay5r]

It's the difference between "in the index" and "indexed". The URLs you're talking about are "in the index" in that Google is aware of them. However, they're not indexed.

Any URL in Google's index (any URL they're aware of) can have PageRank.

[Patrick Taylor]

Doesn't have to be in the index (to have PR).

Thanks for the replies. I never knew that.