Nofollow links & On-Page Optimization
A webmaster will make a link ‘nofollow’ to tell the search engines not to follow that link. Essentially, a human can click on the link and be directed to another website, but a search engine crawler can not.
To understand the nofollow tag, it’s imperative to understand what ‘follow’ means. By default, links have follow tags. If a link has a nofollow tag, it was manually inserted or your page was designed to do that by the webmaster. A follow link tells crawlers to follow the links and crawl the site; on the other hand, a nofollow tag tells the crawlers they are not allowed to follow the link and it actually prevents them from doing so.
Using nofollow With Internal Linking
It is not recommended to use nofollow tags for internal linking because follow links are crucial for a search engine crawler to properly index your site. Crawlers need to be allowed to follow links so that they can properly navigate through your website's pages. Furthermore, by making all of your site’s internal links follow, you are evenly distributing page authority and ranking power throughout each page of your site. This is an accepted common practice.
When to Use nofollow for Internal Linking
You may use nofollow links pages which are not useful for the search engines to crawl, such as a terms and conditions page. It doesn’t hurt to add a nofollow tag to login pages either, since crawlers can’t get through those pages anyway.
Making an Internal Link a nofollw
To make a link nofollow, simply add the tag: rel=”nofollow”.
<a href=”/” rel=”nofollow”>nofollow this link</a>
Unamo SEO’s Optimization tool will check if any internal links on your page have nofollow tags.
Happy linking!