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    Categories: GoogleLinksSEO

Google: Don’t Nofollow Your Own Internal Links

Are you nofollowing internal links on your site?  If so, you might want to remove them unless you have a pretty good reason to be using it.

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.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.
Jennifer Slegg :Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.