Crawl Field Notes

nofollow on links

The nofollow relationship marks a link whose destination should not receive the normal endorsement signal.

Atlas version atlas-2026-07-28-v1 · Section: Crawler and indexing directives

How it works

Modern search crawlers may treat it as a hint and can still discover or fetch the destination through that link or another source.

How to validate it

Record discovery separately from ranking or endorsement semantics; a fetched nofollow target does not prove the directive was ignored.

Common failure

Using nofollow as a security boundary or a guaranteed discovery block confuses link semantics with access control.

Machine-readable editions

The same article is available as Markdown and JSON. These alternates are linked here but are not submitted through the sitemap or IndexNow.

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