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The page tells crawlers not to follow its links

MediumConfirmedQuick winseo.indexability.nofollow

What this check looks for

A nofollow directive applies to every link on this page. Crawlers will still read the page, but they will not use its links to find anything else.

Why it matters

A page-level nofollow cuts off one of the routes crawlers use to discover the rest of your site. On a hub page — a category listing, a sitemap page, the home page — that can leave whole sections undiscovered.

When the check passes, your report says: “Crawlers are free to follow the page's links”.

What it costs your score

When this check fails it removes 10 points from your SEO score, before the status, confidence and repeat multipliers are applied. SEO carries a weight of 5 in the overall score.

It shares the seo.indexability family ceiling of 45 points: however many findings that family produces, together they cannot remove more than that from SEO. One underlying problem showing up in several places is still one problem.

Severity
medium
Default confidence
confirmed
Status when triggered
warn
Deduction
10 points
Family cap
seo.indexability · 45
Category
SEO
Module
Seo audit
Fix owned by
user
In the ruleset since
2026.09

How the whole score is calculated

How to fix it

Remove the page-level nofollow unless you intend to endorse none of the page's links.

Crawlers use links to discover pages; a page-level nofollow removes this page as a route to everything it points at.

  1. Find the directive: <meta name="robots"> in the page source, or an X-Robots-Tag response header.

  2. Remove nofollow from it, keeping any other directives that are intentional.

  3. If specific links genuinely should not be endorsed, use rel="nofollow", rel="ugc" or rel="sponsored" on those links instead.

How to confirm it worked

  • curl -sS ‹url› | grep -iE 'name="(robots|googlebot)"' — should not contain "nofollow". We read both names, and none counts as nofollow

  • curl -sSI ‹url› | grep -i x-robots-tag — should not contain "nofollow"

A named slot like ‹domain› — and the braces left in the configuration below — is filled in with your own values when this rule appears on a report.

Technical detail

The directive was found in ‹source›, with the value ‹value›.

This is the page-level form, which applies to every link in the document. It is different from a rel="nofollow" attribute on an individual link, which is a normal and appropriate thing to use on user-submitted content and paid placements.

Google has treated link-level nofollow as a hint rather than a directive since March 2020. The page-level form in a robots meta tag is still honoured as a directive.

If the page is a hub — anything whose job is to link onward — this is worth removing. If it is a page whose outbound links you deliberately do not want to endorse, leaving it is a reasonable choice, and the per-link attribute is usually the more precise tool.

Standards and references

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Run the check that produces this finding, on its own, against any domain.

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