Myth: to handle near-duplicate pages, just pick one — canonical or noindex, same result.
No. They route crawl differently.
A canonical keeps the duplicate crawlable and indexable as a candidate; Google still fetches it, still re-renders it, then chooses. Signals consolidate, but the crawl cost stays. It's a suggestion Google can overrule.
noindex drops the page from the index but, as we covered, still needs recurring crawls to confirm the tag.
Neither stops the crawl. If saving crawl is the goal, the answer is usually robots disallow on patterns Google never indexed, or fixing the parameter that spawned the duplicates.
The tradeoff: canonical preserves ranking signals at full crawl cost. noindex sacrifices the page to clean the index.
Pick by what you're protecting, not by reflex.
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Canonical and noindex pull crawl budget in opposite directions on duplicates
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