Skip to content
SilktideHelp

Page nofollow

A page can instruct search engines not to follow any of the links on it. That is rarely what anyone intends for a normal content page, so Silktide reports pages carrying this instruction for you to confirm.

A page-level nofollow is set with a robots meta tag in the page's , or with an X-Robots-Tag response header:

<!-- Tells search engines to ignore every link on this page -->
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">

This is different from rel="nofollow" on an individual link, which is a legitimate way to distance yourself from a specific destination (such as a paid or untrusted link). The page-level directive applies to all links at once.

Why this matters

Links are how search engines discover your pages and how ranking credit flows between them. A page-wide nofollow cuts both off: crawlers may not discover pages linked only from there, and the page passes no authority to anything it links to, including your own content.

In practice the directive usually arrives by accident - a staging setting left on after launch, or an overzealous SEO plugin default - and quietly weakens the site's internal linking.

How to fix it

  1. If the nofollow is unintended, remove it. Check the page's robots meta tag and the X-Robots-Tag response header; also check for a none directive, which implies both nofollow and .
  2. If you only want to distance specific outbound links, use rel="nofollow" (or rel="sponsored" / rel="ugc") on those links instead of a page-level directive.
  3. If the page-level nofollow is deliberate, the finding.

How Silktide tests this

  1. Test only pages that are otherwise eligible for search indexing.
  2. Detect a page-level nofollow from the robots meta tag or the X-Robots-Tag response header (the none directive counts, as it implies nofollow).
  3. Flag the page when the directive is present. Individual links with rel="nofollow" are not flagged.

Learn more

Last updated

Was this page helpful?