nofollow on internal links: Crawl Audit check 63

Short answer: rel="nofollow" on a link tells search engines you'd rather they didn't follow it. On a link to your own page, that works against you: internal links are how Google finds your pages. Check 63 warns when any internal link on the page has nofollow. Google's own advice for pages on your site you don't want crawled is robots.txt, not nofollow.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: no link to your own site (starting with / or containing your domain) has rel="nofollow".
• Warning: one or more do.

What Google says

• Google's guide to qualifying links says to use nofollow for links where "you'd rather Google not associate your site with, or crawl the linked page from, your site". Then: "For links within your own site, use the robots.txt disallow rule."
• Since 2019, nofollow is a hint, not a command: "All the link attributes, sponsored, ugc, and nofollow, now work today as hints for us to incorporate for ranking purposes. For crawling and indexing purposes, nofollow will become a hint as of March 1, 2020."

So nofollowing an internal link can't reliably stop Google crawling the page, and it can stop that link helping Google find it. If a page shouldn't be crawled, disallow it in robots.txt. If it shouldn't appear in search, use noindex (check 39).

Where internal nofollow comes from

• Old advice about "sculpting PageRank" by nofollowing login or about pages.
• Themes that add nofollow to cart, account or login links.
• Link plugins set to add nofollow to every link, including your own.

devmarde.com has no internal nofollow links. Our admin pages are kept out through robots.txt instead.

On your platform

• WordPress: check the link settings in the block editor, and any link plugin's rules for internal links.
• Shopify, Wix and Squarespace: look for custom code or theme settings adding rel to your menus and footer.
• Next.js: search your components for rel="nofollow" on Link elements.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Qualify your outbound links to Google (updated 10 December 2025), checked 3 October 2026.
• Google Search Central blog, Evolving "nofollow", 10 September 2019.