SEO & link value · Knowledge
Should internal links ever be nofollow?
The clean rule: internal links are never nofollow. Your own site vouching for its own pages is the point of internal linking – withdrawing that vote wastes value without buying anything.
Since Google's 2009 accounting change, value assigned to a nofollow link evaporates instead of flowing to the other links – internal nofollow is a leak, not a steering wheel.
Why people try it, why it fails – and the right tool per case
The attempts usually aim at three targets. Target one: steering value to money pages by nofollow-ing “unimportant” internal links – that is PageRank sculpting, dead since 2009 (own question), and today it strictly loses value site-wide. Target two: keeping utility pages like login, cart or account out of the index – wrong tool: nofollow on links neither deindexes the target nor reliably prevents crawling (hint status); a robots meta noindex on the page itself does that job properly, and truly private areas belong behind authentication, not behind link attributes. Target three: taming crawl paths through filter and parameter jungles in shops – legitimate concern, wrong lever again: canonical tags, a curated set of indexable filter pages, robots rules for parameter patterns and clean information architecture are the instruments that actually work (the crawl-budget question expands on this). What remains after all three targets dissolve is the affirmative case for internal follow links: your navigation, breadcrumbs, related-content boxes and in-text references are how value and meaning circulate through your own site – the one link graph you fully control. The practical guard: a site-wide nofollow tool must therefore never touch internal links by design – ours doesn't, treating everything on your own domain (plus whitelisted friends) as untouchable, which is precisely the safety property to check in any tool of this class.
Key facts
- Rule: internal links are never nofollow – the internal graph is your own trust circulation.
- Since 2009: sculpted value evaporates – internal nofollow leaks value site-wide.
- Keeping pages out of the index: noindex on the page – not nofollow on links to it.
- Private areas: authentication; filter jungles: canonicals, robots rules, architecture.
- Tool safety property: a site-wide nofollow tool must never touch internal links.