"noindex, follow" doesn't preserve crawl the way you think

"noindex, follow" doesn't preserve crawl the way you think

The clever-sounding move: noindex,follow on thin pages to keep link equity flowing while staying out of the index. The catch nobody mentions — over time, Google treats a long-term noindex page roughly like noindex,nofollow.

Google has said that once a page sits noindexed long enough, it stops crawling it as often and the links on it carry less and less. The "follow" you were counting on decays. And until then, the page is still being crawled to confirm the noindex — so you saved no fetches anyway.

If a page exists only to pass links, that's a structural problem, not a meta-tag fix. Build real, indexable hub pages instead.

noindex,follow is a slow fade, not a clever hack.

The "follow" expires.