# nofollow on links

Canonical HTML: /atlas/nofollow
Atlas version: atlas-2026-07-28-v1
Category: Crawler and indexing directives

## Definition

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

## 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.

## Related topics

- [robots.txt](/atlas/robots-txt)
- [Meta robots](/atlas/meta-robots)