{
  "schemaVersion": "crawler-atlas-1",
  "atlasVersion": "atlas-2026-07-28-v1",
  "canonical": "/atlas/nofollow",
  "title": "nofollow on links",
  "category": {
    "slug": "directives",
    "title": "Crawler and indexing directives"
  },
  "definition": "The nofollow relationship marks a link whose destination should not receive the normal endorsement signal.",
  "mechanism": "Modern search crawlers may treat it as a hint and can still discover or fetch the destination through that link or another source.",
  "validation": "Record discovery separately from ranking or endorsement semantics; a fetched nofollow target does not prove the directive was ignored.",
  "commonFailure": "Using nofollow as a security boundary or a guaranteed discovery block confuses link semantics with access control.",
  "related": [
    "/atlas/robots-txt",
    "/atlas/meta-robots"
  ],
  "modified": "2026-07-28"
}