Does noindex metatag have a negative effect on the canonical URLs PageRank?

Question

A page has this URL:

http://example.com/pages/some-page/

There's a pagination on this page which uses a GET parameter page which would result in URLs like:

• http://example.com/pages/some-page/?page=2
• http://example.com/pages/some-page/?page=3
• http://example.com/pages/some-page/?page=4
• etc.

All of these pages have the same canonical tag (without the page parameter):

<link rel="canonical" href="http://example.com/pages/some-page/">?

Still the URLs with parameter get indexed by search engines.

Would it affect the PageRank of the non-parameter version of the page to add noindex to the URLs with the page parameter?

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

(as they all have the canonical URL of the page that should stay indexed)

Answer 1

You should not use both noindex and rel=canonical, because noindex won't let pages pass any PageRank to its canonical version.

rel="canonical" is a hint, not a directive, so Google will decide which page to take and show in search results.

Here are posts at seroundtable, there they cite John Mueller's comments, from Google:

No, you should not combine the noindex with a re-canonical pointing at an indexable URL

Answer 2

Too add a bit more info to Binarysurfs answer, if the content on the paginated pages isn't the same as on the first page you are setting the canonical tag too, it often doesn't work as the content on canonicalised pages should be the same as the canonical page.

What you might want to do instead of noindexing the paginated pages is using the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” mark up on them.

This consolidates indexing properties, such as links, from the component pages/URLs to the series as a whole and can help Google send users to the most relevant page/URL—typically the first page of the series.