Canonical & noindex? Use together

[nicole.healthline]

For duplicate pages created by the "print" function,

seomoz says its better to use noindex (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not)

and JohnMu says its better to use canonical http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6c18b666a552585d&hl=en

What do you think?

[davidfricks]

I'm working to remove low quality pages from a directory while at the same time allowing a few high quality pages in the same directory to be spidered and indexed.  To do this I placed a robots noindex tag on the low quality pages we don't want indexed.

This noindex tags where implemented yesterday, but the low quality pages aren't going away.  I even used "Fetch as Googlebot" to force the crawl on a few of the low quality pages.  Maybe I need to give them a few days to disappear, but this got me thinking: "Why would Google ignore a robots noindex tag?"  Then I came up with a theory.  I noticed that we include a canonical tag by default on every page of our site including the ones I want to noindex.  I've never used a noindex tag in conjunction with a canonical tag, so maybe the canonical tag is confusing the SE spiders.

I did some research and found a quote from Googler JohnMu in the following article:  http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020151.html  It's not an exact match to my situation because our canonical tag points to itself, rather than another URL.  But it does sound like using them together is a bad idea.

Has anyone used or seen canonical and noindex tags together in the wild?  Can anyone confirm or deny this theory that the canonical screws up the efficacy of the meta robots tag?

[RyanKent]

I agree with Lindsay's reasoning but am not clear on her statement on this subject: "If your website's print pages include a link back to the original page, you can use the meta robots 'noindex' tag here too. The page stays out of the index and any link value will be passed back to the original, canonical, web version of the page."

If you add the "noindex" tag to the print page, search engines will disregard the page which SHOULD leave them with only the canonical version of the page. You are requiring the search engine to do some guessing which is what we want to avoid. By using the canonical tag, we are expressly telling the search engine the correct version of the page to index.

From the above quote, it sounds like Lindsay is suggesting to use both "noindex" and the canonical tag. The focus of her article is there are superior methods of canonicalizing web pages without using the canonical tag, so it leaves me unclear on the logic.

I use the canonical tag presently in these situations. I would love to ask Lindsay for additional clarification on the reasoning for the "noindex" tag in this instance. The last blog comment was a question asked in May which was never responded to, so it seems like she doesn't visit the site too often.