Ok to internally link to pages with NOINDEX?

[OMGPyrmont]

I manage a directory site with hundreds of thousands of indexed pages. I want to remove a significant number of these pages from the index using NOINDEX and have 2 questions about this:

1. Is NOINDEX the most effective way to remove large numbers of pages from Google's index?

2. The IA of our site means that we will have thousands of internal links pointing to these noindexed pages if we make this change. Is it a problem to link to pages with a noindex directive on them?

Thanks in advance for all responses.

[AlanMosley]

yes, but they should be noindex,follow so that the link juice flows back out of the pages, if no index,nofollow then the link juice will be lost

[danatanseo]

Yep! What Alan said!

[MoosaHemani]

Agree with Alan to have a no index, follow tag on pages that you need to no index from the Google Index!

[OMGPyrmont]

Great. So you don't think it's a red flag to search engines when a site has a large number of noindexed pages, that are still being (internally) linked to?

[AlanMosley]

no I don't think so, you would be cleaning up their index for them.