Appropriate use of the NoIndex tag

[CuriousityinSEO]

If you have multiple domains with the same content and you link them together but hide the title/metas in the noindex tag, does this pass on link value while dodging the duplicate content issues?   Look at teh source code of some of these domains:  chambrelatwilliamsburg.com, thekenwoodoflakeview.com, thehallmarkofcrevecoeur.com, thedevonshireoflisle.com and theheritage-raleigh.com

I had never seen this before and I was wondering if it is an "o.k." tactic to employ and if there is any value in linking this way (are the links passing any value)?  Any thoughts?

[irvingw]

This is doing nothing. It's just a comment line before and after that section.

<title>Assisted Living Facilities | Senior Communities | Brookdale Senior Living</title>

Their sites are not indexed because they are cross domain canonicalizing. They probably got tagged by Google and did this then they got penalized for having several identical sites on different domains.

SERP 1

SERP 2

[irvingw]

Sorry for the formatting. Would be great if SEOmoz could fix that

Don't follow what these guys are doing. Cross canonicalizing is only a suggestion to Google and they may or may not follow it. If you want to pass PR from one obsolete site to your main site 301 redirecting is what you want to do. Hope this helped.

[CuriousityinSEO]

Thanks for the feedback Irving!  Do you think that the links are passing any value to the main page?  If so, would you employ this method?

[irvingw]

No page rank is not being passed, 301 is the way to go to pass PR from the other sites to the main sites.

The only reason this would be set up this way intentionally is because they are directing people to these URLs and they want them to still be visible on the web for some reason. But they won't rank and they won't pass PR to the main site they are canonicaling to. A while back Matt Cutts said they did pass PR but that was probably before it got abused.

[Dr-Pete]

Irving's correct - that tag is basically nonsense, as best I can tell. It's just a comment. There's no approved tag to block part of a page from Google. Google has a directive that looks similar to this, but it's for Google Search Appliance (internal site search) and doesn't impact organic search (we actually just tested it recently, coincidentally).

I disagree a little bit about cross-domain canonical. I have some friends at major media properties who have had good luck using cross-domain canonical for syndicated content, and it does seem to pass link-juice when used appropriately. It is true that Google doesn't always honor the cross-domain use, so it's very situational.

301-redirects are certainly more reliable, but they are different in the sense that a canonical will only remove the source page from search, whereas a 301 will remove it for users as well. So, it really depends on what you're trying to accomplish.