Quick answer
The nofollow robots directive tells compliant crawlers not to follow links from a page. NOTABIS reports nofollow-directive when it finds nofollow in a page’s robots meta directive or X-Robots-Tag response header. Remove an accidental page-wide directive when important internal links should be discoverable; keep it when the exclusion is deliberate.
What the issue means
There are two commonly confused forms of nofollow:
- A page-wide directive, such as
<meta name="robots" content="nofollow">orX-Robots-Tag: nofollow, applies to links on that response. - A link-level attribute, such as
<a rel="nofollow" href="…">, qualifies one link.
The current NOTABIS rule measures the first form. It does not count individual rel="nofollow" attributes as a page-wide finding. Nofollow is a crawler hint, not authentication, an indexing removal command, or a guarantee that a URL will never be discovered through another source.
Why it matters for SEO
An accidental page-wide nofollow can cut off useful internal discovery and reduce the link context passed through a site. It can also affect external links that readers expect crawlers to understand. Google describes nofollow, ugc, and sponsored as link relationship values and says links with these values will generally not be followed; URLs can still be found through sitemaps or other links.
Nofollow is not automatically harmful. A site may use link-level ugc or sponsored values for user-generated or paid links, and a controlled page-wide directive may be part of a private or temporary section. The effect should match the page’s purpose.
How NOTABIS detects it
For each measured HTML page, NOTABIS checks the first robots meta value and the X-Robots-Tag response header. If either contains the case-insensitive token nofollow, the page receives the nofollow-directive finding. The check is page-scoped and records what was present in the response observed during the audit; it does not infer intent or inspect every anchor’s rel attribute.
How to check it yourself
Inspect the document head and response headers:
curl -sS -D - https://example.com/page -o /dev/null
curl -sS https://example.com/page | grep -i 'robots'
Search shared layouts, CMS SEO settings, middleware, and server configuration for nofollow. Then inspect important internal anchors separately for rel="nofollow", rel="ugc", or rel="sponsored".
How to fix it
If the page is public and its links should be crawled, remove the accidental page-wide directive from the final response and deploy the correct template or header configuration. If only one untrusted or paid link needs qualification, use the appropriate link-level rel value instead of suppressing every link on the page. Recheck the final response after redirects and confirm the important links remain present in the HTML.
When this is intentional or does not need fixing
Temporary workflows, untrusted link collections, and sections whose outbound links should not be associated with the site can justify nofollow. A nofollow directive does not make a private page private; use authentication for confidential content and noindex when a crawlable page should be excluded from search. Document the reason so a future template change does not remove it accidentally.
Related issues
Also review noindex directives, robots.txt availability, and weak internal linking. See Google’s guidance on qualifying outbound links for current rel values.
Run a NOTABIS audit
NOTABIS shows pages where a page-wide nofollow directive was observed, helping you separate an accidental template setting from an intentional crawler policy.