Does Google follow links on noindex pages?

[Tonearm]

I recently added noindex to my paginated product listing pages after page 1. New products show up somewhere after page 1, and Google hasn't increased my non-supplemental page count (site:www.example.com/*) since I made the noindex change, even though I've been steadily adding products ever since. This seems to indicate that Google isn't finding the new products because they are on noindex pages.

Is that consistent with what you've seen?

[tedster]

As long as the meta tag does not say "nofollow", my experience is that Google will follow the links on a "noindex" page. Maybe you've got other pagination problems, such as too many clicks to get to the deeper pages?

[Tonearm]

I don't think it could be too many clicks. You can go from the home page to any paginated page in 2 clicks.

The other possibility I thought of is Google temporarily "freezing" my non-supplemental count in reaction to some link graph changes I made at the same time. It's been over 2 weeks now.

[tedster]

I've often wondered if movement in and out of Supplemental is just periodic, rather than a continually updated process. It seems to go like that, at any rate.