Internal Nofollow Links Example
I ordered the last partridge on my ramrod to disown the one before it, and it refused to be skewered in such company again.
The short answer
- What it is
- An internal nofollow link is a link to a page on the same site that has rel set to nofollow, sponsored, or ugc. Those values are meant for links you do not vouch for.
- Why it matters
- It tells search engines not to trust or pass value through a link to your own page. That can starve the target of internal signals and slow its discovery.
- How a crawler should report it
- Report one row per link with the source page, target URL, and the exact rel value found. Only count internal links, since rel=nofollow on an external link is normal and should pass.
- Live examples
/lab/internal-nofollow/(positive)/lab/internal-nofollow/near-miss/(near miss)
Why Nofollow on Your Own Pages Backfires
Internal nofollow links are links between your own pages that carry rel="nofollow". The attribute was made for links you can't vouch for, such as blog comments. Google later added sponsored for paid links and ugc for user content. None of those labels fit a link from your own article to your own guide. You wrote both pages, so you can vouch for them.
The habit comes from old advice on PageRank sculpting. Site owners tried to keep value from flowing to login, cart, and contact pages. They hoped the saved value would go to better pages. Google said in 2009 that this does not work. A nofollowed link still uses up its share, and that share is simply lost. Today, the attribute more often comes from a CMS setting, a theme, or a plugin that adds it to every link in a block.
Browsers ignore nofollow, so visitors see no change. Since 2019, Google has treated these values as hints, and in March 2020 that was extended to crawling and indexing. It may or may not follow the link. Either way, you have told it that the link is not a real endorsement. If that link is the only path to a page, the page can end up rarely crawled, with little internal link value.
To detect the issue, scan every internal link for a rel value that holds one of the three tokens. Check templates as well as article text, since one setting can affect thousands of links. To fix it, remove the attribute from links to pages you want found. For pages you don't want in search, leave the link alone and use noindex on the target. To keep bots out of a section, use robots.txt. Then remove links that serve no user at all.