Links: Follow & Nofollow Internal Inlinks To Page

Pages that have both rel=”nofollow” and follow links to them from other pages.

Links marked with nofollow link attributes will generally not be followed by search engines. Links without a nofollow link attribute will generally be followed.

Inconsistent use of links that are follow and nofollow might be a sign of an issue or mistake, or something that can be ignored.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Links’ tab and ‘Follow & Nofollow Internal Inlinks To Page’ filter and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

To populate this filter ‘Crawl Analysis’ must be performed via ‘Crawl Analysis > Start’.

Nofollow and follow Inlinks can be seen in the lower ‘Inlinks’ tab with the ‘All Link Types’ filter set to ‘Hyperlinks’, where the ‘Follow’ column is ‘True’ and ‘False’.

Export in bulk via ‘Bulk Export > Links > Follow & Nofollow Internal Inlinks To Page’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when pages have a mix of links marked with rel=”nofollow” and others without this attribute pointing to them from other pages.

For example if the following page:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/

Had an internal outlink with a rel=”nofollow” such as:

<a href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/login/" rel="nofollow" >Login</a>

And the following page:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/services/

Had an internal outlink without a rel=”nofollow” such as:

<a href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/login/">Login</a>

How To Fix

Review the consistency of the use of rel=”nofollow” on internal links.

These might be valid to URLs that ideally wouldn’t be crawled, or they could be by mistake.

Remove the nofollow link attribute to important URLs you wish to be crawled, indexed and receive PageRank. Add nofollow to any links that are incorrectly missing it.