Page set to nofollow

What it is

The page’s robots meta tag includes nofollow, for example <meta name="robots" content="nofollow">. It covers every link on the page at once, menus and footer included, and asks search engines not to follow them. It is not the same as rel="nofollow" on a single link, which affects only that link.

Why it matters

Google reads the rule as do not follow the links on this page ; without it, Google may use those links to discover the pages they point to. Pages linked only from nofollow pages then depend on your sitemap or other links to be found, and the page’s links are likely to pass no credit to the pages they point at. The page itself can still be indexed. When a page is kept out of the index, nofollow is seldom needed: the page can still lead crawlers to your other pages.

How Asky checks it

Asky reads every robots and googlebot meta tag in the page’s raw HTML, with the name in any letter case, splits their combined content at commas and spaces and reports the page when one value is nofollow, in any letter case. Tags for other crawlers and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header are not read. rel="nofollow" on individual links is a separate signal, covered by the internal nofollow link issues. With noindex in the same or another tag, this issue, noindex and none are all reported; none raises only the none issue. Links on this page still count as followed in Asky’s link checks.

Reported as a warning with medium severity.

How to fix it

Decide whether search engines should follow this page’s links. For content pages, they almost always should.
Remove nofollow from the tag. If nothing else remains, delete the tag.
If the page should stay out of the index but its links should be followed, keep noindex alone. That clears this issue and the none issue, and leaves the noindex issue for you to mark resolved.
To hold back value from particular outbound links, such as ads or user comments, mark those links with rel="sponsored", rel="ugc" or rel="nofollow", as Google describes for outbound links , instead of the whole page.
Find where the rule is set, in a robots or googlebot tag: the page’s advanced settings in an SEO plugin, the template, or head custom code. Check the X-Robots-Tag response header as well.
To leave it as it is: if the page’s links deliberately lead nowhere you want crawled, such as a login or checkout step, mark the issue resolved.

Example

https://example.com/blog/pricing-guide asks crawlers to ignore every link in the article:


<!-- Before -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, nofollow">
 
<!-- After -->
<meta name="robots" content="index, follow">

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