Can No-Indexed Pages With Canonical To New Page Pass Google Signals?

Kenichi Suzuki asked Google’s John Mueller an SEO question that got an interesting response. The question was “I’m curious about this thread. If page A has noindex and rel=canonical pointing to Page B, are the signals of A transferred to B?” John replied, “I don’t think that’s defined.”

Here are those tweets:

I don’t think that’s defined.

— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) May 26, 2022

You’d think the answer would be something Google has defined? I mean, you’d think a noindex on page A that has a canonical to page B, would not pass signals? I mean, doesn’t Google have to index the page to see the canonical and then it also has to index the page to see the noindex. But still, wouldn’t that cancel out everything?

I guess it depends on other factors. Maybe sometimes google will pass the signals on those pages and sometimes not?

Forum discussion at Twitter.