noindex, nofollow and robots.txt: what kills a link
Three different things that are constantly confused: nofollow prevents weight transfer through the link, noindex removes the page from the index, and robots.txt prohibits crawling it. All three are important for link promotion, and they kill the link in different ways.
Differences
| Instruction | Where it is | What it does | What happens to your link |
|---|---|---|---|
rel="nofollow" | In the link itself | Requests not to consider the link as a recommendation | There is a mention, weight is not transferred |
noindex | In the page's meta tag or response header | Removes the page from the index | The link is useless: the donor page is not in search |
Disallow in robots.txt | In the file on the domain | Prohibits crawling the page | The robot will not see either the page or the link on it |
rel="ugc" / rel="sponsored" | In the link | Marks the user-generated or advertising nature | Considered as a hint, weight is usually not transferred |
The worst combination: dofollow on a noindex page
This exact case occurs on past services: the link is honest, without nofollow, but the page itself is closed from indexing. In our pool, there are such platforms, and their share of publications in the index is measured at zero — hence they receive low priority or are turned off altogether. How the selection works is described in the article “How we select platforms”.
rel attribute in the source code often lies: one platform removes nofollow with a script already in the browser, another, on the contrary, adds it. You should look in the developer tools, not in the “Page Source” — details in the article about weight transfer.What to check on your site
- The promoted page should not contain
noindex— otherwise, links lead nowhere. - It should not be closed in
robots.txt: a closed page will not be crawled by the robot, even knowing the address. - The canonical address should point to itself, not to another page.
- You can check everything at once with robots.txt check, meta tag analysis, and index checker.
Are nofollow links needed at all
Yes, as part of a natural profile: a link mass consisting entirely of dofollow looks less plausible than a mixed one. But it is not worth paying for them as if they transfer weight — that’s why we keep this flag for each platform separately.