Links to pages marked as noindex

We have some incoming links to pages we've marked as noindex and I'm wondering if those links are passing any currency or whether they end up being worthless. ... They don't refer much, if any, traffic so they are not very valuable in that sense.

I found them through the links tab in our Google webmaster tools so I at least know that Google is aware of the links. But I wonder if it's worth contacting those folks to ask them to link to an "indexable" page.

Any thoughts?

In theory, I think, it's amixed bag.

1 - the spiders aren't crawling the page, so it won't be indexed.

2 - the links are allowing the spiders to see folks saying the pages have some value, so there is value.

Now that I think about it - wouldn't the external links allow the pages to be spidered? or does the noindex absolutely preclude indexing regardless of the path to the page - interesting question.

As far as I can tell from our webmaster tools, the spiders are crawling, or trying to crawl, the pages even though they are marked noindex. So far, those pages have remained out of the index.

That's what got me thinking about the value of the links to noindex pages. Someone says they have value, so ... do they have value even though the site itself is saying it shouldn't be indexed? By saying noindex one could infer there is no value to the page, but actually the page is valuable, but is also perhaps a near duplicate of another page and has been noindexed to avoid spamming the index. ...

Could be overthinking it, but it's a pretty real scenario. I can't imagine we're alone.

In my mind the issue dies with the noindex edict. If G isn't going to index the page (per your instruction), then it becomes irrelevant whether any value is, in fact, passed to the page - it won't be in the index, so it'll never show in the SERPs.

Theoretically this should also kill off any PR value the page had/has over time.

Still, it's a very interesting question.

Google still crawls the page. They have to, in order to read the noindex tag within it. They then do record that the page exists, they do keep a cached copy of it, but they keep all reference to it out of their public index. As far as I can tell, they do internally assign a PR figure to that page.

Very interesting. Of course, now that you point it out, the crawling part seems obvious to me.

So, they know about it, record it, keep it for themselves, but don't share it via the SERPs with the public...

Yep ...

... except for a short time last year when millions of pages with a "noindex" tag on them did actually appear in the SERPs for a few days.

Google fixed that bug within days once they were alerted.

To take this just a little further ... I can see where the value of a link to page that isn't indexed may not matter for that page, but if that non-indexed page had some link currency would it then be passing it on to whatever indexable pages it were linked to?

Again, maybe a little theoretical, but it has relevance for me, at least.

And thanks for your previous consideration.