Google may add "noindex" pages to sitelinks

[sbohdjal]

Today I was surprised to see that Google added 8 "noindex" pages as sitelinks. I promptly marked them as "blocked" in Google Webmasters Tools.

I'm guessing Google's algorithms selected these pages because they're linked to from every page, but they're tagged as "noindex" because they're just alphabetical indexes (literally "A", "B", "C", etc.) that change with every site update. I would have expected Google to respect the robots meta tag for sitelinks. Webmasters may want to take note.

[tedster]

Thanks for that report. I think you're right - the sitelink listing has nothing to do with whether the listed pages are "in the index" or not. I once blocked a noindexed Contact Us page from being used as a sitelink.