Nofollow Directives
A rel=”nofollow” attribute can be added to links to inform search engines to ignore and not follow them. Nofollow links do not pass authority and will therefore not impact search rankings and can be used for both internal and external links. Within our SEO Office Hours Notes below, we cover advice from Google around how they manage this directive with further recommendations for best practice use of nofollow tags.
For more on nofollow directives, check out our article: Noindex, Nofollow & Disallow.
Don’t Use Nofollow on Footer Links
John recommends against using nofollow on footer links.
Add Nofollow to Shared Links
If you are giving out links to be shared on other websites, you should ask for nofollow to be added. If a few links are added without the nofollow, it probably won’t cause a penalty, but you can disavow the URLs with the links to be safe.
Don’t Use Nofollow for PageRank Sculpting
John says it’s OK to use nofollow internally to prevent things like a calendar being crawled, but recommends against it for PageRank sculpting and says it won’t change anything.
Googlebot Requires a Consistent Response for Different User Agents
You need to provide the same response for all users based in the US, including Googlebot, or the content might not be indexed.
Google Crawls Repeated Links Where One is Nofollowed
If you have 2 links on a page to the same target, but one is nofollowed, then Google will just crawl the followable link.
AJAX is not 100% equivalent to normal static HTML pages, but it should be possible to make pages rank as well. Avoid using fragments in URLs, and check with Fetch and Render.
JavaScript Affliliate Links Should be Nofollowed
Any affiliate links which are added using JavaScript should also be nofollowed.
Nofollow Is Ok to Control Googlebot
It’s OK to use nofollow on internal links to control Googlebot behaviour but you need to be careful you are not making it hard for your site to be crawled.
Most Affiliate Links Are Automatically Nofollowed
Affiliate links for main affiliate programs are automatically recognised and effectively nofollowed. They won’t cause penalties.
Affiliate Links Should be Nofollowed
Affiliate links should be nofollowed like any other paid link.