you did? really? from what program? it's a genuine site of a company we've been working with in India, and I cant see that alert or make it happen?

interesting, I have AVG on IE here and the site: search is all big green ticks.

i'll email them and point them to this thread.

Matt Cutts: If the destination page has a noindex tag, that has no impact on the distribution of pagerank at all, because Google still follows the links, and thus must calculate outgoing pagerank.

Eric Enge: Can a NoIndex page accumulate PageRank?

Matt Cutts: A NoIndex page can accumulate PageRank, because the links are still followed outwards from a NoIndex page.

Eric Enge: So, it can accumulate and pass PageRank.

Matt Cutts: Right, and it will still accumulate PageRank, but it won't be showing in our Index. So, I wouldn't make a NoIndex page that itself is a dead end. You can make a NoIndex page that has links to lots of other pages. For example you might want to have a master Sitemap page and for whatever reason NoIndex that, but then have links to all your sub Sitemaps.

Eric Enge: Another example is if you have pages on a site with content that from a user point of view you recognize that it's valuable to have the page, but you feel that is too duplicative of content on another page on the site. That page might still get links, but you don't want it in the Index and you want the crawler to follow the paths into the rest of the site.

Matt Cutts: That's right. Another good example is, maybe you have a login page, and everybody ends up linking to that login page. That provides very little content value, so you could NoIndex that page, but then the outgoing links would still have PageRank.

Now, if you want to you can also add a NoFollow metatag, and that will say don't show this page at all in Google's Index, and don't follow any outgoing links, and no PageRank flows from that page. We really think of these things as trying to provide as many opportunities as possible to sculpt where you want your PageRank to flow, or where you want Googlebot to spend more time and attention....

... We did an interview with Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz where we talked about the fact that NoFollow was a perfectly acceptable tool to use in addition to robots.txt. NoIndex and NoFollow as a metatag can change how Googlebot crawls your site. It's important to realize that typically these things are more of a second order effect. What matters the most is to have a great site and to make sure that people know about it, but, once you have a certain amount of PageRank, these tools let you choose how to develop PageRank amongst your pages....

... The URL removal tool is another way to do it. Typically, what I would probably recommend most people do, instead of going the NoIndex route, is to make sure that all their links point to the version of the page that they think is the most important. So, if they have got two copies, you can look at the back links within our Webmaster Central, or use Yahoo, or any other tools to explore it, and say what are the back links to this particular page, why would this page be showing up as a duplicate of this other page? All the back links that are on your own page are very easy to switch over to the preferred page. So, that's a very short term thing that you can do, and that only usually takes a few days to go into effect. Of course, if it's some really deep URL, they could certainly try the experiment with NoIndex. I would probably lean toward using optimum routing of links as the first line of defense, and then if that doesn't solve it, look at or consider using NoIndex.

So, if they have got two copies, you can look at the back links within our Webmaster Central, or use Yahoo, or any other tools to explore it, and say what are the back links to this particular page, why would this page be showing up as a duplicate of this other page? All the back links that are on your own page are very easy to switch over to the preferred page.

What happens if rel="canonical" points to a non-existent page? Or if more than one page in a set is specified as the canonical version?
We'll do our best to algorithmically determine an appropriate canonical page, just as we've done in the past.

Can Google follow a chain of rel="canonical" designations?
Yes, to some extent, but to ensure optimal canonicalization, we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page.

Thanks For Sharing Your Knowledge With Us....

John, firstly... thanks for the beer.
It was well received.

Secondly, the main point of the matt and eric interview is that pages blocked with noindex in the robots.txt or noindex in the meta tags or pages blocked with nofollow in the robots.txt still build PR.

Thats what matt and everyone else (rand etc) are saying.

It doesnt matter how many times you explain your technique, youre still blocking pages without blocking whether they build PR.

Also, the whole purpose of blocking pages with nofollow is so they dont get ANY PR -- leaving that PR free to be channeled to the pages we dont want in the supplementals yes?

But does it still build a pagerank?

Because since the page is noindex, the PR cannot be assigned to it = Dangling Page/Dead End Page!!! Hello? Is that clear now man?

The PageRank arrives at the noindex page but does not stick there.

If I am wrong, why did Matt say that? Did he suck that out of his fingers?

3. Cutts plays fast & loose with the language; his statements are, as often as not, imprecise and/or self-contradictory. Whether this is by design or nature remains unknown.