Does Google read the canonical tag in a noindex page?

[Josuah]

I have an indexed page in my site and once it gets "old", I put a <noindex,follow> metatag on it and a canonical tag pointing to another page.

Do you know if Google follows and counts the canonical link or just deindex the page?

Thanks.

[goodroi]

From Google's help page [google.com...] that because we have to crawl your page in order to see the noindex meta tag, there's a small chance that Googlebot won't see and respect the noindex meta tag...

According to this page they will crawl the page so they should see the canonical tag.

The best solution depends if your goal is to reduce duplicate content or to funnel link juice around your site.

[deadsea]

They may see the canonical tag, but it doesn't mean they will honor it if there is also a noindex. It seems that you really only need one or the other for Google. Why both?

[tedster]

Why both? Because some other site might link to that page with a non-canonical URL - one that you haven't thought of and haven't got any server protection for.