Linking to noindex pages: is it a problem?

Internal links to noindex pages can waste crawl budget and link equity. Find where you link to noindexed URLs and decide whether to keep those links.

999

audited sites affected

What it means

An internal link points to a page that has a noindex directive, so Googlebot can follow the link but won't index the target page. This is a notice-level issue, not a blocker, because the link itself is crawlable—Googlebot will still visit the URL.

Why it matters

Crawled but unindexed pages still consume crawl budget and siphon link equity away from pages you actually want in search results. For AI agents and search, the page won't appear in SERPs and won't be available for citation in AI Overviews, even though users may reach it through navigation.

How to fix it

Remove the noindex directive from the target page's HTML so it becomes indexable.
If the page is intentionally excluded from search, add rel='nofollow' to internal links pointing to it to preserve link equity.
Verify the page's canonical URL points to itself and matches the noindex directive.
Check that the page isn't also blocked by robots.txt, which would prevent Googlebot from crawling it entirely.

When it's not a problem

This is fine when the noindex page is a utility page (like thank-you pages, search results, or filter views) that genuinely shouldn't appear in search. It's also acceptable if the page has very few internal links and low traffic, since the crawl budget impact is minimal.

How common is it?

999 audited sites in our corpus currently show this issue. The breakdowns below show which platforms, gatekeepers, verticals and countries are most exposed.