Nofollow on links to your own pages
What it is
The page contains one or more links to other pages on your own site marked rel="nofollow". Nofollow is meant for links you would rather not vouch for, usually to other sites. On internal links it tends to come from an SEO plugin option, a theme’s button or menu component, or links pasted from elsewhere.
Why it matters
Google reads nofollow as a wish not to associate with, or crawl, the linked page, and for links within your own site it points to a robots.txt disallow rule instead. A nofollow link to a page you want found gives up a vote from your own site, and the page may be crawled later or less often. When every internal link to a page is nofollow, that page is reported separately.
How Asky checks it
Asky reads the page’s links from its raw HTML; JavaScript links are not seen. A link is internal when its host matches the page’s exactly, so www and non-www differ. The page is reported when any internal link, anywhere on the page, has nofollow among its rel values, as in rel="ugc nofollow". A link that also appears without nofollow, with the same text in the same area, is not counted. Image-only links and links to the page itself are not checked. It runs in full-site audits and selected-page audits of up to 8,000 pages, with Link analysis on, that reached every page without blocks or errors; error pages are skipped.
Reported as a warning with medium severity.
How to fix it
- Open the finding for the list of links, and find what adds the attribute: a plugin option, a theme component or the link itself.
- Remove
nofollowfrom links to pages you want found and ranked, in the setting or template where possible so every page is fixed at once. - For pages crawlers do not need, such as login, cart or internal search results, remove the nofollow too and, as Google suggests, disallow them in robots.txt instead.
- To leave it as it is: if the links point to filter combinations of a faceted listing, Google’s faceted navigation guidance says nofollow on them may help. Keep it and mark the issue resolved.
Example
The footer of https://example.com/blog/pricing-guide marks the link to the pricing page nofollow:
<!-- Before -->
<a href="/pricing" rel="nofollow">Pricing</a>
<!-- After -->
<a href="/pricing">Pricing</a>