Do links from a No-index page provide link equity?

[Guest]

Do links from a No-index page provide link equity? I'm curious if anyone here has tested this.

I know a No-follow tag will block link juice from flowing, but I'm wanting to know if links from a Noindex page will still send link juice.

I do have a way to test this if nobody is sure.

[Michale]

Non-indexed links won't pass link equity in long term. Even a non-index, follow link is equal to a non-indexed, no follow link in the "long-term".

[Chris]

Hmmm, interesting question.

There may be a good reason why someone creates a no-index page. But that shouldn't necessarily mean a link should have zero value.

I don't think there is a definitive answer to this question without asking a Google engineer. Since they're likely to say "I'm not telling", I suspect that there may be a little... but not much.

Now I'm itching to go and test my theory

[Khurram]

It doesn't. Noindex means Google hasn't indexed it because of low quality or whatsoever. If Google finds the page of no quality then why would the link juice will pass? It makes no sense

[Schieler]

Hey there,

Assume that if Google finds it, and thinks it's important it will pass link equity. What is important to them? Well that's the big question isn't it?

[Guest]

Hey there,

Assume that if Google finds it, and thinks it's important it will pass link equity. What is important to them? Well that's the big question isn't it?

exactly what I was thinking. You can Noindex a page on robots.txt, but if you include in the sitemap then Google will still crawl.

As long as links aren't marked "nofollow", I think link equity from certain noindex pages will still pass some juice

[Gražvydas]

Robots.txt is a directive. It does not forbid google from crawling, it directs. While google is pretty good at listening, it might crawl if it’s coming from an inboud link I guess. (if it’s do follow) No index meta tag means no indexing, but the page still can be crawled. For example you can see this via gsc. On a No index page it says crawled, but not indexed due to noindex tag. Also, there is a way that crawler reads your website and I think it starts from robots.txt then if you list your sitemap it will go to sitemap and then based on the directives on robots.txt follow the pages in the sitemap

[Jeremy]

If the the page has a noindex tag in the html of the page google will not crawl the page. If the page is set to noindex in robots.txt Google will still crawl the page if they find it from a link. If they crawl the back they will see the link so I feel that it might come down to how the page is noindexed.

[Leonardo]

So much confusion in this thread. There's a single correct answer, but for the sake of summarizing:

• Robots.txt DOES forbid Google from crawling, because they respect it.

• Robots meta tag on the other hand DOES NOT forbid crawling (In fact the bot would need to crawl the page to see it to begin with).

• Same reasoning, a noindex tag DOES NOT prevent Google from crawling (Again, it not only controls indexing, but the bot NEEDS to crawl the page to see the tag, if it's in the HTML to begin with).

• The fact that a page has a noindex DOESN'T mean is low quality. That's an assumption, but the noindex could have gone there by mistake.

And finally, official answer from Google on the matter, but you can take it as you want. Just to be clear, not considering the link doesn't mean the bot won't crawl the linked page.

[Jonas]

Well, you tell Google not to include the pages, in my World nothing on those pages existing Google.

If you make Them noindex, follow. Thats completly different.