Is META NOINDEX a permanent mark for Google?

[1script]

Hi All,

I have a forum site where I have put

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

on all post listings (and there are many hundreds of pages of them). The thinking was that since they don't really contain anything other than the lists of actual content pages and links to the same, they are of lesser quality and therefore should be excluded from G* index.

I am now of an opinion that I must have been not feeling well when I dreamed this scheme up. What I think has happened is I disrupted the entire internal PR distribution because I have eliminated an entire level of links: most of the listings are only 1 level deep from the homepage and most of the content is two levels deep - through that listings level which I have no-indexed. Some content pages are linked from elsewhere (internally and ex-) but most have no other links but from the no-indexed listings.

Anyways, I am removing the noindex meta tags from the listings pages and the question then becomes: will these pages get revisited and re-indexed or they'll stay no-indexed forever because they would not re-process them because they already know from the past that they should not be indexed?

I hope I'm making some sense here (both in terms of no-index effect on internal PR distribution and in my concern for permanency of no-index tag) and would love to hear from other webmasters that might have gone through this change in the past - how quickly (if ever) can pages regain "INDEX" status after having been NOINDEX'ed for awhile?

Thanks!

[rainborick]

It doesn't matter that a page has had a robots <meta> tag set to "noindex" for a long time. It will eventually be re-crawled and if the <meta> tag has been removed, the page will be indexed normally shortly thereafter. Of course a page that has been set to "noindex" for a long time probably doesn't have a high priority in Google's crawl queue, so it will likely be some time for these pages to be indexed.

[aristotle]

<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, FOLLOW">

With this metatag, the links will still be followed, even though the pages won't be indexed. In other words, Googlebot will still pass through these pages and follow the links to other pages.

Added: I should have also mentioned that PR will still be transferred through these non-indexed pages to the pages beyond.

[1script]

Thank you guys.

Well, it still looks like a wrong signal to send by noindexing the only pages that the main content is exclusively linked from. Even though technically G*bot should be able to collect links from those pages.

Also, regarding the PR flow: I guess I understand it's technically what should happen but every one of the noindexed pages shows TBPR as grayed out and this very much freaks me out. It would seem to indicate that the PR has been removed from those pages, so how can it flow any further? There is of course a chance that it's simply a technical issue with not being able to show PR for pages that are not in the index but the concern remains.

I guess, last but not least: I've implemented noindex back in May (which might have been a damb move by itself to make big changes during the time of Google's own big changes) with hope that it would improve rankings. That did not happen, so I just simply see no use for giving these pages any treatment that's different from others.

So, I'm removing the meta no-index tags today and will keep an eye on any changes in crawling/ranking that follow