What happens when the noindex, nofollow directives are in the HTTP header and that URL is also being redirected somewhere, will Google respect or ignore the directive. Gary Illyes from Google hinted that Google will likely ignore the directive to be safe.

William Sear asked Gary Illyes “Will directives (noindex, nofollow) from a URL that redirects (301, 302) be respected or ignored?” “This particular use case the noindex, nofollow directives are in the HTTP header, so crawling the HTML would not be required to see the directive,” he added for clarification.

Gary Illyes from Google had to provide a vague response, he said on Mastodon, ” I need to be reasonably vague here and I hate it and I apologize for that.”

His response was, “I think we shouldn’t forward the noindex with redirects unless we can be exceptionally certain that the target also wants the noindex. I imagine that on same site the noindex would forward in some cases, but across sites it would not. This is a pretty bad hijack vector, hence being vague.”

Here is a screenshot of the full conversation:

Forum discussion at Mastodon.