301'ing a Noindex,Nofollow Page

[triggerfinger]

Interesting inquiry, I'd like to get some opinions:

Imagine a site with parameterized URLs which are noindex,nofollow via META tags, and disallowed via robots.txt; With the same content existing on flattened urls with are index,follow;

Many backlinks exist to the parameterized URLs, so in effort to gain that equity, we want to 301 the parameterized urls to the corresponding flattened urls.

The question is, will the link juice flow? I've been told that any link juice will not flow through any page that is noindex,nofollow; However, I've also been told that since the 301 is server side, the META tags will never load. Whether or not this is the case, it still leaves the issue of the robots.txt.

I tend to think that the juice will not flow, however I've been met with contradicting opinions, so I'd like to get some ideas before I move on.

Thanks in advance.

[rainborick]

Google rarely tries to fetch a URL that is blocked via robots.txt, so Googlebot is extremely unlikely to ever see the 301 redirect while that block is intact. Googlebot will also not have seen the "nofollow,noindex" <meta> tags while that block exists.

If you remove the block in robots.txt and a 301 redirect is in place, the content of the original page(s) will not be sent by the server. So, again, Googlebot will not see the <meta> tag on the pages at the URLs that have now been redirected. If there are valid pages at the destination URLs and they do not contain a "noindex" or "nofollow" <meta> tag, then PageRank would flow in and out of that destination URL because the new page will supercede any prior information from the original URLs. But, again, this all requires removing the blocks in robots.txt or nothing else matters.

[triggerfinger]

Thanks for the input, that pretty much confirms what I was thinking.

[g1smd]

Yes. That's the correct situation, exactly.