If I have the following structure: Index Forum -Threads Contact and the Forum page has: <meta name="robots" content="noindex" /> Code (markup): Will the search engines view the Forum page and follow the links to Threads? Or will they back out when they see that meta tag? I'm trying to disclude duplicate parts of my site that look the same in code but I can't do it with robots.txt as it would need some advanced wildcards.
noindex will help you not to show forum in search engines, but it will be crawling the page and indexing links of thread on the forum page. If your threads doesn't have any "noindex", then they will show up in search engines.
Yes, well said "noindex" means more or less same word "nofollow" Means you are instructing to Search Engine not to count that link on search Result
Second that, it is a good idea to make use of noindex for certain pages on your site, this can help you to avoid heavy cross linking and be peneliced by google.