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?
