Don’t use rel=nofollow on internal links Search Engine Guideline

Description

Using rel=nofollow on internal links dilutes PageRank flow through your site.

Help

Google treats rel=nofollow as a hint not to pass ranking credit, so PageRank flowing to internal nofollow links is generally wasted. To keep internal pages out of search results use noindex instead of nofollow. Don’t use robots.txt for this, because pages blocked by robots.txt can still be indexed if other pages link to them.

Applicable standards

• Google

Change history

• 5.36 Jan 2020 Take X-Robots-Tag into account.
• 5.0 Oct 2012 Fixed false positive.
• 4.2 Dec 2010 Fixed false positive.
• 3.5 Dec 2009 Added.

This page describes a web site issue detected in HTML documents by SortSite Desktop and OnDemand Suite.

Rule ID: SeoGoogleNoFollow