Marking a link rel="nofollow" tells search engines "don't pass any trust or ranking signal through this one." That is exactly what you want on a comment link to a stranger's website, and exactly what you do not want on a link from one of your own pages to another.
What this finding means
Crawl Cove's nofollow-internal-link check looks at every crawled page's internal links, links pointing at another page on your own site, and flags any that carry a nofollow attribute. A link from a page back to itself is skipped entirely, since it passes no signal anywhere regardless of the attribute, so there is nothing to block. The finding lists every genuinely nofollowed target found on the hosting page.
A real finding looks like this:
2 internal link(s) marked rel="nofollow": /pricing, /blog/case-study
One finding per hosting page, naming every nofollowed internal target on it.
Why it matters
Search engines treat a nofollowed link as a hint to not pass ranking signal through it, an old technique once called "PageRank sculpting" that Google has explicitly discounted for over a decade. Using it on your own internal links does not protect anything, since there is no untrusted content to distance yourself from, it just blocks a channel your own pages could otherwise use to pass authority to each other. On a site that already has a limited amount of internal linking to work with, needlessly nofollowing some of it is giving away signal for free.
How to fix it
- Open the page named in the finding and find each nofollowed link using the targets listed in the evidence.
- Remove the
rel="nofollow"attribute from the link (or dropnofollowfrom a combinedrelvalue that also carries something else, likenoopener). - Check where it came from. A CMS, SEO plugin, or theme setting sometimes adds nofollow to a whole class of links automatically, in which case fix the setting, not just the one instance.
- Reserve nofollow for genuinely untrusted or user-generated external links, comment links, paid or sponsored placements, not your own navigation or in-body links.
- Re-crawl the site to confirm the finding clears.
False positives and edge cases
- A link from a page to itself is never flagged, even if it happens to carry nofollow. It passes no signal to any other page either way, so there is no PageRank being blocked.
- External nofollow links are out of scope for this check. Nofollow on an outbound link to another website is the attribute doing its intended job; this check exists purely for the internal case.
- A page appearing once per finding, not once per link. If a page has several nofollowed internal links, they're all reported together against that one hosting page.
Related reading
For links that resolve to a redirect instead of the final page, see Internal Link to a Redirect. For pages that would benefit from more contextual internal links in the first place, see Internal Linking Opportunities.
Google documentation: Qualify outbound links
Frequently asked questions
- Isn't nofollow supposed to be used on external links?
- Yes, that's the legitimate case. rel="nofollow" exists to mark untrusted or user-generated external links, comment links, paid placements, so search engines don't pass your site's trust to them. Between two pages you control, there's nothing to protect against, so the same attribute just blocks signal you wanted to send.
- Will removing nofollow from an internal link change anything visible on the page?
- No. It's an attribute in the HTML, not something a reader sees. Removing it only changes how a crawler treats the link.
- Does a nofollowed link still get crawled?
- Google has treated nofollow as a hint rather than a strict block since 2020, so a nofollowed page may still get crawled and indexed through other paths. What it reliably does is stop ranking signal flowing through that specific link, which is the actual harm this check flags.
- Why doesn't this check flag nofollow on links to other websites?
- Because that's the attribute working as intended. This check only looks at internal links, links from one page on your site to another, where nofollow has no defensive purpose and only costs you.