If you’ve ever slapped rel="nofollow" on all your internal blog tag links thinking it’ll help you avoid duplicate content penalties, congrats—you just gutted your site’s internal link graph.
Google doesn’t follow or index links marked nofollow. If your tag page is noindexed and all the blog post-to-tag links are also nofollow, congrats again: that tag page might as well not exist.
Saw this firsthand on a content site with about 300 tags. Search traffic tanked after an SEO plugin added nofollow to all tag anchors during a bulk update. Reverting didn’t help instantly—the damage was already crawled.
The logic seemed innocent: avoid indexing shallow tag pages. But the sitewide nofollow nuked any internal vote structure. It wasn’t duplicate content—it was orphaned content.
Quick fix was to whitelist internal tag URLs from the nofollow rule and start returning them to the sitemap manually for a while. Took about two weeks before they started showing up again.
What Google Actually Says About Nofollow
Google treats rel=”nofollow” as a hint, not a command—except you never know when it decides to treat it strictly. It’s like Schrödinger’s crawl budget.
The 2019 update changed things a bit: rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc” were introduced alongside nofollow, but most plugins didn’t update logic. Some still treat all external links as equal-opportunity nofollow candidates.
They recommend not using nofollow for internal links unless absolutely necessary. But there’s no clarity on what counts as “necessary,” and SEOs are skittish.
Testing this out is worse than debugging JavaScript on a Chromebook—results show weeks later, and causality is fuzzy unless your site is massive.
One Nofollow Tag Can Block a Whole Crawl Chain
Ran into this with a publisher who had their related-post widgets wrapped in a <div data-nofollow="true">, which some frontend dev assumed did something meaningful. Turns out some edge-case crawler shims interpreted that as: “don’t follow these links.” Zero indexing on follow-up articles.
Point is: “nofollow” doesn’t need to be syntactically correct to create problems. If a custom-rendered frontend injects nofollow-like patterns into markup, and those patterns propagate through major link nodes, your crawl depth flattens hard.
Classic example where badly implemented sanitization logic “prevents PR bleed” by adding nofollow to anything matching /tag/ or /category/ URLs. Side effect: Google can’t discover interrelated content chains.
Tag Pages Are Not Duplicate Content Traps By Default
You only get thin content tags if you a) don’t post often or b) fragment topics across too many microtags. This isn’t nofollow’s job to fix.
Truncating the excerpt and removing post titles won’t fix crawl budget inefficiency either. Tags without canonical structure and titles are considered low-quality, but it’s better to improve them than bury them.
We did a toggle test on a WordPress multisite install: one blog had 200 tag pages set to noindex, one didn’t. Over 6 months, the indexed one gained nearly 3x the long-tail traffic, mostly on phrases lifted from the tag slug itself.
If you’re convinced tag pages are toxic, you might be solving a UX or IA problem with a bot directive. That’s like using duct tape to fix RAM alignment.
When Plugins Decide Nofollow For You
Yoast, Rank Math, AIOSEO—all of them have toggles buried at least three menus deep for handling nofollow on category and tag pages. And their defaults aren’t consistent across updates.
Most of them started off with category noindex + tag noindex by default. Then slowly rolled that back, except in migration scenarios. If you’re restoring backups, those rules often persist silently.
In one restore, Yoast forgot that tags were actually configured as indexable before the disaster. Entire taxonomy disappeared from index even though the toggle literally said “Allow indexing.”
If you’re not diffing your sitemap before and after plugin updates, you’re leaving it to chance. I use a dirty little diff script between sitemap.xml versions to smoke out missing tags.
Tag Pages with Outbound Nofollow Links Still Leak Value
Seen this mistaken assumption: “If we nofollow all outbound links on tag pages, we won’t lose pagerank.” False. Google just treats it as a dead end—it doesn’t hoard that juice and give it to internal next-best links.
The actual page gets indexed as usual, but you’re creating artificial dead zones. Nofollow isn’t a conservation mechanism—it just drops the link from consideration entirely.
Source: John Mueller backed this up in one of those hangouts—nofollow doesn’t shift vote to other links. It snips it.
If outbound links are monetized or sketchy, nofollow makes sense. If they’re other quality blogs or sources, you’re hamstringing horizon scanning bots.
Testing Selective Tag Canonicalization
I tried a weird filter once where only the top 20 performing tag pages (trafficked and broadly thematic) had self-canonicals enabled. The rest all pointed to the main /tags/ archive. Google ignored 80% of the canonicals.
The logic: don’t waste crawl time on low-relevance tag pages. The outcome: Google just kept indexing new tags anyway if they had discoverable internal links, even if we pointed canonicals elsewhere.
Which showed: canonical isn’t directive—it’s a nice suggestion. Google sticks with first-crawled or most-linked, regardless of what you say.
So if you’re depending too heavily on direct canonical overrides for tag hygiene, you’re better off cleaning how they’re linked than just trying to fake their importance via meta tags.
Edge Case: AMP and Nofollow on Tags
AMP plugins—especially older ones—like to convert tag pages into AMP-compatible variations. Some force a nofollow unless you dive into theme sanitization filters.
In one older Genesis child theme, I found angry JS errors on AMP tag pages because the plugin treated all .entry-content → <a> as external links. It flat appended rel=”nofollow” to every anchor it couldn’t resolve as a local permalink—even opening in new tabs triggered it.
Result: mobile tag navigation effectively became a crawl black hole. And users couldn’t open posts from tags because AMP markup was invalidated silently.
Got around it by force-declaring rel=”” manually inside the render_post_link filter. Dirty, but it worked.
Quick Fixes That Actually Worked (for Now)
Do a manual crawl with Screaming Frog or Sitebulb. Export all links marked as nofollow. Cross-reference with internal domains. You’ll almost always find surprise internal nofollows from settings or themes that shouldn’t be there.
Add a sitemap.xml diff watcher to your deploy routine. A single plugin update can drop hundreds of tag URLs silently.
If your CMS has faceted filters (e.g., color, size, date), consider applying nofollow to those specifically, not entire taxonomy layers.
Never add nofollow from the frontend blindly. Any JS that injects link attributes based on regex needs to be audited after every framework shift.
Use Chrome’s inspect tools, but also check raw HTML source render. Some React setups show different link props depending on hydration stage.
Monitor Search Console’s Coverage → Excluded table. If tag pages swing up in “Crawled – currently not indexed,” you might be overusing nofollow or misusing canonical.
Finally, bake logic into your content workflow. If a post uses a tag, that tag should be linked in a way that leads somewhere useful—not nofollowed into oblivion.
Nofollow On Tags Is a Poor Substitute for Planning
I once tried to fix an editorial mess with a nofollow plugin. We were publishing 20–30 pieces a week, all with 4–5 tags each, half overlapping, none hierarchically useful. Dumped over 9000 tag pages in six months.
Instinct was to noindex and nofollow everything. Flood cleared, but traffic dipped and stuck there. Fix wasn’t in directives—but in better taxonomy banking.
This includes: setting clear naming conventions (no plural-vs-singular duplicates), monthly audits to merge orphan tags, automated tools to detect tag bloat over time.
It’s boring work, but nofollow won’t save a broken tagging strategy. It just hides your mess from Google—and often, yourself.
