Has Nofollow Internal Outgoing Links: Why to Remove Them

What "Has Nofollow Internal Outgoing Links" means

This audit flag fires when a page on your site links to another page on the same site using a link that carries the rel="nofollow" attribute. An internal link is any link that points from one URL on your domain to another URL on your domain. The "nofollow" part tells search engines you do not want to vouch for, or pass ranking signals to, the page you are linking to.

That combination is the issue. Nofollow was designed for links you cannot fully trust, such as user-generated comments or paid placements. Pointing it at your own pages tells Google you do not trust your own content, which is rarely what you actually mean.

Why nofollow on internal links is usually wrong

Most internal nofollows trace back to a discredited tactic called PageRank sculpting. The old idea was that if you nofollowed links to low-priority pages such as your login or contact page, the "link equity" those links would have carried would be redirected to your important pages instead. People wanted to hoard ranking power and steer it where it mattered.

That has not worked since 2009. Google changed how PageRank is divided so that the share assigned to a nofollowed internal link simply evaporates. It does not flow back to your other links. So instead of redirecting value, you are quietly destroying it. Every internal nofollow is a link whose ranking signal vanishes into nothing.

Internal linking is one of the strongest levers you control. It tells search engines how your pages relate, which pages are most important, and how crawlers should move through your site. Nofollowing those links breaks that chain and weakens the pages you most want to rank.

When an internal nofollow might be intentional

There are a few narrow cases where you may have added nofollow on purpose, and that is fine to leave alone:

• Links to a login, account, or admin URL you do not want crawled or surfaced in search.
• Links to a shopping cart or checkout step that has no standalone search value.
• Faceted-navigation or filter links that would generate near-infinite low-value URL combinations.

Even here, nofollow is often the wrong tool. For genuinely private areas, controlling access or using a noindex on the target page tends to be cleaner. Treat intentional internal nofollows as the rare exception, not the default.

How Google treats nofollow as a hint since 2019

In September 2019, Google announced that nofollow would become a hint rather than a strict directive. For crawling and indexing purposes that change took effect on March 1, 2020. Google also introduced two more specific attributes, rel="sponsored" for paid links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content.

"Hint" means Google may still choose to crawl a nofollowed link and consider it, rather than ignoring it outright as before. This does not rescue PageRank sculpting. The behavior is unpredictable by design, so you cannot rely on nofollow to either block or redirect anything internally. The practical takeaway is unchanged: do not nofollow your own links unless you have a concrete reason.

How to diagnose the problem

You need a crawler to find every internal link that carries the attribute. A few reliable approaches:

• Screaming Frog: crawl the site, then go to Internal, HTML, Outlinks and filter where the link contains rel="nofollow".
• Sitebulb: use its hints for URLs that receive both follow and nofollow internal links, or only nofollow internal links.
• Ahrefs Site Audit: look for the "page has nofollow incoming internal links" issues, which surface pages reachable only through nofollowed links.

You can also spot-check by viewing source on a suspect page and searching for the markup directly:

<a href="/services/" rel="nofollow">Our Services</a>

How to fix it

The fix is to remove the rel="nofollow" attribute from internal links that should pass equity. The corrected markup is simply a clean link:

<!-- Before -->
<a href="/services/" rel="nofollow">Our Services</a>

<!-- After -->
<a href="/services/">Our Services</a>

Where the nofollow comes from a theme, template, or plugin, fix it at the source so it does not regenerate. Many WordPress SEO and link-management plugins add rel="nofollow" to internal links by default, so check those settings first. After editing, re-crawl to confirm the attribute is gone and the target pages now receive followed internal links.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Nofollowing internal links to "save" PageRank. The equity evaporates, so you lose it instead of saving it.
• Leaving a plugin default in place. If the attribute is added automatically, removing it once on the page will not stick.
• Using nofollow when you mean noindex. Nofollow controls a link signal; noindex controls whether a page appears in search. They are not interchangeable.
• The right move: let internal links be followed by default and reserve nofollow for genuinely untrusted or non-search-worthy destinations only.

FAQ