If I have a page on my blog that is marked noindex or blocked by robots.txt should I mark all links within my blog that point to that page as rel="nofollow" or not?
Example:
I publish a post on my blog and mark it as noindex. That post will show up on my blog's front page and all links on the front page are do follow. So when a bot comes on the main page it crawls all the links but when the bot gets to the link to a noindex post does it take note that the link and crawl that page?
Should I nofollow a link to a noindex page?
As a general rule, nofollow should only be used on links to pages of external websites you don't trust or you don't recommend. There is no reason to set nofollow on internal pages or links. So in your case, the answer is no.
but when the bot gets to the link to a noindex post, does he note that link, but doesn't index the page or what?
The bot follows the link, identifies the page, but does not pass it for evaluation and indexation. It extracts all the links from the noindex post and tries to follow them too. So, yes this is correct.
You can read more in my personal articles about when to use nofollow, and about the indexation process.
Don't worry about it, while making a page no-index only nofollows all the links on that page (not links to it from other pages), making it nofollow isn't going to help you at all. Follow or nofollow, each outbound link is spreading out the internal balance of SEO juice (or PageRank). In other words, you can't really do structure/sculpting by using internal, nofollow links anymore.
