Recently, nofollowing internal links gained traction as many webmasters who received a recent outbound link manual action decided to nofollow every link on their sites, including internal links as well.
Gary Illyes, in yesterday’s keynote with Stone Temple said that sites shouldn’t nofollow their own internal links.
Nofollow is probably never the answer, especially on your own site. I can think of corner case scenarios where the target page would be robotted for whatever reason, and then if it is robotted and not indexed yet, if you don’t want to get that page indexed, then you probably don’t want to point to it with anchors.
John Mueller did say this previously, but in respect to the outbound link manual actions. Last month, when Google sent out a mass number of outbound link manual actions targeting bloggers who did paid reviews without disclosing or nofollowing the links, many bloggers simply nofollowed every link on their site… some who nofollowed their internal links too.
And some people attempt to use nofollow either to prevent a page from being indexed (you are best to block the from robots.txt prior to publishing or place a noindex on it if Google has indexed it first).
And lastly, some use in in an attempt to influence crawl budget or for PageRank sculpting.
Jennifer Slegg
Latest posts by Jennifer Slegg (see all)
- 2022 Update for Google Quality Rater Guidelines – Big YMYL Updates - August 1, 2022
- Google Quality Rater Guidelines: The Low Quality 2021 Update - October 19, 2021
- Rethinking Affiliate Sites With Google’s Product Review Update - April 23, 2021
- New Google Quality Rater Guidelines, Update Adds Emphasis on Needs Met - October 16, 2020
- Google Updates Experiment Statistics for Quality Raters - October 6, 2020