Only Nofollow Internal Links

What "only nofollow internal links" actually means

This check flags a page that has one or more internal links pointing to it, but every single one of them carries a rel="nofollow" attribute (or the newer rel="ugc"/rel="sponsored" equivalents misapplied to internal navigation). There is no followed path into that page from anywhere else on the site. Google can technically still find the URL through your XML sitemap, an external link, or a stray reference, but from the perspective of your own internal linking graph, the page is functionally an orphan with a locked door.

Nofollow was designed by Google in 2005 as a way to tell crawlers "don't pass trust or ranking signal through this link," originally aimed at blog comment spam and paid links. It was never meant for a site's own navigation, footer, or related-content modules. When it shows up wall-to-wall on internal links to one URL, it is almost always a template bug, an overzealous SEO plugin setting, or a leftover from a "PageRank sculpting" attempt that stopped working around 2009.

Why this matters for crawling and rankings

Google has stated plainly, including from John Mueller, that internal nofollow links do not let you sculpt PageRank distribution around your site. What they do instead is reduce the crawl priority and discovery signal for the target page. A page with zero followed internal links looks, structurally, like a page you do not think is important enough to point to. Google's crawlers use internal link patterns as one input for deciding what to fetch, how often, and how much weight to assign relative to the rest of your site.

In practice this shows up as: the page indexes slowly or not at all, it gets recrawled less frequently after the first pass, and it ranks worse than a comparable page with normal followed internal links pointing at it, because it is receiving effectively none of your site's internal authority. If the page is something you actually want to rank, category pages, cornerstone guides, product pages, this is lost opportunity you're creating yourself.

How this usually happens

In four years of running crawls, the same handful of causes account for almost every instance:

• A faceted navigation or filter component that nofollows all generated links by default, and the target page also happens to be linked from one of those components elsewhere.
• An SEO plugin set to "nofollow low-value pages" applied too broadly, catching real content pages in its net.
• A related-posts or "you might also like" widget that nofollows everything as a blanket crawl-budget-saving measure.
• Old PageRank sculpting logic left in a theme from the pre-2010 era that nobody has audited since.
• A migration where redirect or link-building scripts added rel="nofollow" to every anchor tag during a bulk find-and-replace.

How to detect it

You need a full-site crawl with link attribute reporting, not just a spot check.

1. Screaming Frog: Run a crawl, then use the "Inlinks" tab for the target URL. Filter by "Follow" column set to FALSE across all rows. If every inlink shows nofollow, you've confirmed the issue. Screaming Frog's bulk export (Bulk Export > All Inlinks) lets you check this site-wide instead of page by page.
2. Sitebulb: The "Internal Linking" report flags pages that only receive nofollowed links under its link-equity hints, and visualizes the internal link graph so you can see isolated nodes.
3. Google Search Console: Use URL Inspection on the affected page. If "Crawled" and "Indexed" show gaps or the page hasn't been crawled recently despite being live for a while, that's a secondary signal worth cross-checking against your crawl data.
4. Server logs: Check Googlebot hit frequency for the URL. A page that gets linked with follow attributes site-wide typically sees more frequent bot visits than one that's functionally unlinked.

How to fix it, step by step

1. Identify every template, widget, or plugin setting that is generating a nofollow attribute on links pointing at the affected page.
2. Decide honestly whether the page deserves a followed link at all. If it is a real content or thin utility page like a login form or cart, nofollow might be intentional and correct, in which case this flag is a false positive you can safely ignore for that URL.
3. For pages you do want indexed and ranking, remove the rel="nofollow" attribute from the anchor tags in the relevant template or component.
4. If a plugin is the source, check its settings for a rule like "nofollow archive/tag/filtered pages" and add an exception for the URL or URL pattern in question.
5. Re-crawl with Screaming Frog to confirm at least one followed internal link now points to the page.
6. Add a genuinely followed contextual link from a relevant, already-strong page, a hub page, category page, or related cornerstone content, rather than only fixing the automated widget.
7. Monitor crawl frequency in Search Console or your log files over the following two to four weeks to confirm Googlebot picked up the change.

What good looks like

After: at least one followed path Category page Target page followed

FAQ