(Entry was posted by Youness Bermime on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, Thursday, January 18, 2018).

Will page rank pass to posts/pages that are set to noindex?

Hi SEOs, 2nd dumb question of the year: TL;DR:

More details: I want to build a website and have a personal section on it. Obviously, I don`t care about ranking those posts, as they offer probably no value to the target audience, but I want to write more freely on my blog rather than target keywords all the time.

I know that PageRank gets diluted on all pages, and therefore "authority" is divided among those pages (please correct me if I`m wrong.) What I want to know is whether pagerank would pass to the posts I would set to noindex or even keep out of the sitemap and robot file if I could?

Also, I don`t want to waste crawl budget on those pages. Would noindex stop the crawl? Thanks everyone!

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YOUR ANSWERS

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions G+ community.

Francois-Pierre Marcil: You are worrying way too much about SEO, just write.
Casey Markee: To answer your question, yes, NOINDEX pages can pass PageRank. This was confirmed by Google back in 2012. Here is the actual citation via video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB6IJHxhlRQ#t=34m0s And DeepCrawl has one of the best resources on NOINDEX and Craw Budget and PageRank you can find anywhere. Find it here: https://www.deepcrawl.com/blog/best-practice/noindex-and-google/
Dan Thies: A document that is not indexed is still a document, so it must have PageRank and as Casey pointed out, they do also follow links on noindex pages. Noindex won’t stop the crawl, a robots.txt disallow directive would. But if you’re talking about a few thousand pages... “crawl budget” is meaningless and sculpting is pointless.
Steve Wiideman: Why not just gate them and not worry about it?
Richard Hearne: Really you`re wasting your time looking at this and the previous question. If we`re talking about a blog there`s virtually no reason you`d want to worry about NOINDEXing pages like About etc. Spend your time focusing on content.
Michael Martinez: "I know that PageRank gets diluted on all pages, and therefore "authority" is divided among those pages (please correct me if I`m wrong.) " <== Wrong.
Michael Martinez: As for whether a NoIndexed document passes PageRank, it depends on how Google decides to treat the page. John Mueller recently said they`ll eventually stop crawling pages that are NoIndexed, so they won`t receive or pass PageRank.
Adam John Humphreys: Matt Cutts back in the day also stated any link whether followed or not leaks some link juice. Recently we had a big discussion around noindexed directories and their effects on latter pages being indexed. Also, the sitemap must be bang on. The message has to be right across the board and if it`s a custom site oh man can it get messy fast.