Google's faceted navigation guide prefers prevention: disallow filter URLs in robots.txt and keep crawlable only item pages plus one unfiltered listing page, or use URL fragments, which Google generally does not crawl. rel=canonical and nofollow are weaker, slower options.
Thing · Directive
nofollow
A rule, on a whole page or on one link (rel=nofollow), that asks Google not to follow links; Google treats it as a hint.
- Claims
- 10
- In Google’s docs
- 2
- Said at the event
- 6
- Not in docs
- 1
- Kit items
- 5
Glossary · nofollow
A hint not to follow links or pass signals through them; as a page-level robots rule it covers every link on the page. It does not block crawling.
Google’s documentation 2
Documented in
- Qualify your outbound links to Google
- Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of links
- Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specifications
Google treats nofollow as a hint for crawling, not a block: nofollow links will generally not be followed, but the linked pages may still be crawled if Google finds them through sitemaps or other links. To stop Google fetching URLs on your own site, use a robots.txt disallow rule.
Google Search Central, Search Central blog (10 September 2019) · Day 1 · How Google thinks about crawl budget
Said at the event 6
Slide and stage claims that name it, the ones Google’s documentation does not cover first.
Not in docs 1
John Mueller said AI crawlers do not really know what to do with nofollow links, because they look at the content rather than building a link graph; he did not say whether he meant Google's AI systems, other AI crawlers or both.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Consistent with docs 2
The page-level nofollow robots rule tells search engines not to pass signals to any of the links on the page, which John Mueller called a weird and very broad rule that makes the page stand on its own.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
John Mueller recommends rel=nofollow on individual links instead of the page-level nofollow robots rule, so a site can choose which links are useful and which are not.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Confirmed by docs 2
Confirmed by docsD1-C107
The nofollow rule can still consume crawl budget: Google does not crawl through the nofollow link itself, but it still crawls the linked page when it finds that page through other links.
The robots rule none is equivalent to noindex plus nofollow, so a page that carries it will not show up in Search, provided Google can see the tag.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Nothing to verify 1
StageD2-C821
John Mueller suspected that if robots meta tags were reinvented today, the page-level nofollow rule would probably not be part of them.
John Mueller · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Press and analysis 2
AnalysisD2-C065
Audit robots meta tags set by templates and plug-ins: an explicit all rule does nothing and can go, while a page-level nofollow strips link signals from every link on the page and is better replaced by qualifying only the specific links that need it.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
AnalysisD2-C067
nofollow is a link-graph hint for search engines, not an access control: to keep AI crawlers away from content, use robots.txt rules for the specific crawlers; at Google, Google-Extended covers Gemini training and grounding, and the Search generative AI control covers AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Ibrahim Anjro · Day 2 · Controlling indexing
Built on these claims 5
Kit items about nofollow: their own words name it, or several of the claims they rest on do.
Developer requirements 3
Prefer rel attributes on individual links to a page-level nofollow
Rests on 6 claims, 5 of them naming nofollow; its own words name nofollow
Do not use noindex, nofollow or crawl-delay to save crawl budget
Rests on 6 claims, 2 of them naming nofollow; its own words name nofollow
Keep faceted navigation out of the crawl with robots.txt rules or URL fragments
Rests on 12 claims, 1 of them naming nofollow; its own words name nofollow
Also inglossary terms nofollow, Faceted navigation
Connected things 14
Most often named with it
Things named in the same claim, with the number of claims they share.
- robots.txt 3
- Disallow 2
- Robots meta tag 2
- AI Mode 1
- AI Overviews 1
- Crawl budget 1
- Faceted navigation 1
- Gemini 1
- Google-Extended 1
- Grounding 1
- noindex 1
- rel=canonical 1
- Search generative AI control 1
- Sitemaps 1