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Crawlmind
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Rule page.links.internal-nofollow

Remove rel="nofollow" from internal links

page.links.internal-nofollow is a check in Crawlmind's site audit that grades medium-impact issues of this kind. This page explains why the rule matters and the exact fix.

Impact: mediumEffort: lowFixable: 1-click

Why it matters

`rel="nofollow"` on links between pages on your own site is almost never intentional: it stops link-equity flowing through the internal graph and signals to AI assistants that you don't vouch for your own pages. The historical "PageRank sculpting" reason for nofollow-ing internal links was deprecated by Google in 2009.

The fix

```html
<!-- Wrong: internal nav linking to your own pricing page with nofollow -->
<a href="/pricing" rel="nofollow">Pricing</a>

<!-- Right: same-origin links should follow by default -->
<a href="/pricing">Pricing</a>
```

Legitimate uses of `nofollow` on internal links: login-only pages, search-results URLs you don't want indexed, faceted-nav permutations. Use `rel="ugc"` (user-generated content) and `rel="sponsored"` for their specific cases.

References