The only case I can think of where that would be problematic is if your canonical points to another URL which is indexable, e.g.;
- Current url -
/test1
canonical points to/test2
, and has a noindex meta. /test2
allows indexing
Problematic since you’re sending ambiguous signals to Google… does the noindex refer to the /test1
or /test2
Any other normal scenario should be fine.
That’s a solid solution, however in general robots.txt defines where robots can visit, not what they should index.
There’s a disconnect there… if your page is aready indexed, and then you add it to robots.txt, the typical Google response, is to stop crawling that page for changes… but it will not remove your page from indexing.
A mistake people often make is to try to remove a page quickly by using both noindex and robots.txt. Robots.txt blocks the crawler from seeing the noindex, so the page is stuck in SERPs indefinitely.