Should internal links be nofollow? For almost every site the answer is no. The habit survives from an older theory of link equity: that every link on a page spends a share of its value, so nofollowing the login link, the cart and the terms page leaves more for the pages you care about. Google has said plainly that this does not work, and the attribute tends to cause more confusion than it prevents.
Should internal links be nofollow? What Google has said
The clearest statement came from John Mueller, reported by Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable in March 2023: “You don’t hoard anything when you make links nofollow. It’s a common SEO myth.” The same report recalls an earlier remark of his that “internal PageRank sculpting is a waste of time.”
Those two sentences dispose of the main reason people add the attribute. The theory was that a page has a fixed pot of value to hand out, and that marking some links nofollow redirects the pot to the rest. If nofollowing a link does not hoard anything, the pot does not grow for the remaining links. You simply stop that one link from contributing.
Why PageRank sculpting stopped making sense
PageRank sculpting was the practice of shaping how link value flows through a site by selectively nofollowing internal links. Our explainer on PageRank covers the underlying model; the short version is that the sculpting idea depends on nofollowed links not counting against the page’s total. Google’s position, as Mueller put it, is that you are not hoarding anything by doing it.
The received wisdom in some audits still flags “too many outgoing internal links” and recommends nofollow as the remedy. That is treating a structural question with an attribute. If a page links to too many things, the fix is fewer, better-chosen links. If an important page is buried, the fix is linking to it from relevant places, as our guide to internal linking for SEO sets out.
It also helps to remember what an internal link is for. It tells Google that a page exists, what it is about through the anchor text, and how it relates to the pages around it. Nofollowing a link withholds those signals from your own site. You gain nothing in return.
The pages people nofollow, and what to do instead
The usual candidates are pages that should not rank or do not need crawling. In each case the attribute is the wrong tool, because it acts on one link rather than on the page. Every other link to that page, internal or external, still points at it.
| Page or link | Why people nofollow it | Better approach |
|---|---|---|
| Login, account and cart pages | To “save” link value | Leave the link followed; add noindex if the page should stay out of results |
| Thin or duplicate pages | To keep them out of the index | Use a noindex directive, or improve or consolidate the page |
| Faceted filter URLs | To limit crawling of endless combinations | Control crawling with robots.txt rules and canonical tags |
| Terms, privacy and contact pages | PageRank sculpting | Leave them followed; Google says sculpting is a waste of time |
| Internal promotional links | Worry about sponsored-link rules | Not a concern on your own site; the link attributes for paid links are about links you sell to others |
The pattern is consistent. If you want a page kept out of search, say so on the page with the meta robots tag. If you want crawling limited, use robots.txt. Neither depends on catching every link that points at the page, and both keep working when someone adds a new link next year without remembering the attribute.
Faceted navigation is the one real argument
Shops with filters for size, colour, brand and price can generate an almost unlimited number of URL combinations. Nofollowing filter links is sometimes recommended to stop Googlebot wandering through them. It is the only case where the attribute is doing something people can point to, and even here it is a weak control.
The problem is that nofollow is a hint about one link. A filtered URL linked from a sitemap, a product page or another site can still be found and crawled. Robots.txt rules that block the parameter patterns, combined with canonical tags pointing filtered views at the main category, address the URLs themselves. That is a more reliable approach than hoping every link to them carries the attribute.
How to clean up nofollowed internal links
- Find them. Crawl the site and filter internal links by the
relattribute. Many audit tools report nofollowed internal links as a warning, which is a reasonable flag. - Find the source. Most come from a theme, a plugin or a menu setting rather than hand-written HTML. Fix the template once rather than each instance.
- Decide per page type. For each destination, ask whether it should be indexed. If yes, remove the nofollow. If no, add
noindexto the page and remove the nofollow too. - Check your structure. If nofollow was compensating for a navigation that links everywhere, simplify the navigation. A tidy silo structure does what sculpting claimed to.
A cleaned-up link should look like this, with nothing in the rel attribute for an ordinary internal page:
When nofollow still belongs on a link
None of this makes the attribute useless. It still has a job on links that leave your site: links you were paid for, links in user comments and links you do not want to vouch for. Our guide to nofollow links covers those cases and the related sponsored and ugc values. The point here is narrower. Inside your own site, you are vouching for your own pages, and there is nothing to protect by declining to.
The limitation is that Google does not publish how it weights internal links, so nobody outside the company can measure what a nofollowed internal link costs in practice. What is on record is that it does not hoard anything and that sculpting is a waste of time. That is enough to stop doing it, even if it does not tell you how much you were losing.
If you inherit a site full of nofollowed internal links, do not panic either. The cost is a weaker internal signal, not a penalty. Clean it up in the templates, put noindex where you meant noindex, and let the next crawl pick up the change.
Frequently asked questions
Does nofollowing internal links save link equity?
No. John Mueller said: “You don’t hoard anything when you make links nofollow. It’s a common SEO myth.” The remaining links do not gain anything.
Should I nofollow links to my login or cart page?
There is no benefit. Leave the link followed and, if the page should not appear in search, add a noindex directive to the page itself.
Will nofollow keep a page out of Google’s index?
Not reliably. It affects only the link carrying it. Other links can still lead Google to the page. Use noindex to keep a page out of results.
Is PageRank sculpting still a thing?
Google has called internal PageRank sculpting a waste of time. Improve the link structure instead of trying to steer value with attributes.
The takeaway Keep internal links followed. Nofollow does not hoard link value, sculpting is a waste of time, and the pages you want hidden need noindex or robots rules, not an attribute on one link.
