Noindex, follow and side effects

[JLaurent]

Hello,

I am currently considering putting a noindex, follow on some of our internal pages and was wondering if any of you had experienced negative side effects in terms of ranking/indexing for the pages "under" those pages in the navigation.

The pages i would like to put a noindex, follow on are sub-sub category pages, they generate very little trafic and are only here for navigation/crawling and flowing link juice down from the Home page. They also are nothing but a list of 40 links to products pages and are 99% identical to pages on another of our site (hence the main reason for noindexing).

I have read 1-2 years old comments from Matt Cutts stating that noindex pages can and do accumulate page rank, flow link juice and are treated the same as a regular doindex page but i am still cautious given the importance of those pages in our architecture, my main concern would be to mess up the circulation of link juice and cause indexation issues for the products pages underneath in the navigation(we have a very large site). Anyone has experience/feedback on this kind of thing? Do noindex pages get crawled at a normal rate?

Thanks in advance for any info.

[internetheaven]

I'm finding out now! Just noindexed/followed a bunch of pages across several sites I run. Mostly things like terms/contact pages as they are all pretty much similar but some have more important pages noindexed/followed.

Been up for a week or so now and no ill effects as far as I can see.

Biggest debate for me is whether anchor text of links is passed, not just Pagerank. Some people say yes, but I'm not so sure.

[aristotle]

I've had several noindex, follow pages on oneof my sites for more than two years with no apparent problems. I believe that they still pass link juice because GWT includes them in its section on pages with internal links.

Btw, if you do decide to add noindex to some of your pages, be sure to remove them from your sitemap.

[kevsta]

we've got bundles of sites with this in place with no problems at all.

if you think about all the WP blogs out there where the seo pack autoconfigures cats and tags like this its unlikely there would be issues IMO

[gn_wendy]

currently running a test where i REMOVED the noindex, follow and changed it to index,follow for a whole section. monitoring to see changes.

so far inconclusive... but the previously noindexed pages are getting indexed and are stealing positions away from other pages that would be more useful to users (and in terms of income for the site) ... some argue that the pages are "traffic bringers", but on the whole the bouncerate is off the charts since users aren't really finding what they were looking for - but google ranks the page better.

probably depends on the site - and as I said the data is incomplete - but I am leaning towards a "if you don't want users to find the page and go there from a SE - don't let it be indexed"-approach

[FranticFish]

whether anchor text of links is passed, not just Pagerank. Some people say yes, but I'm not so sure

I'm one of those who says yes! Tested about 3 weeks ago.

'noindex,follow' page (A) links on unique phrase to page (B). Page B returned when searching for unique phrase.