Do Nofollow Links Get Indexed?

Yes, a page linked only by nofollow links can still be indexed. The nofollow attribute controls whether Google follows one particular link. It has no power over whether the destination URL ends up in the index, because Google can reach that URL through a sitemap, a link from someone else's site, or simply because it already knew the address.

The confusion is understandable. Nofollow sounds like an instruction about the destination, so people assume marking a link nofollow keeps whatever it points at out of search. It does not, and treating it as a privacy or exclusion setting is how confidential pages end up in Google.

There are two questions here, not one

People type this question meaning one of two quite different things, and the answers point in opposite directions.

The first is about the link: does Google crawl through a nofollow link to reach the page on the other side? Usually not. The second is about the page: if a page has nofollow links pointing at it, can it still be indexed? Yes, easily. Both are true at once, because a link is only one of several routes to a URL, and closing one route does not close the rest.

Almost every problem in this area comes from answering the first question and assuming it settles the second.

What Google's documentation actually says

Google's guidance on qualifying outbound links covers both halves in a single passage, and it is worth reading literally rather than through the usual summaries. Links marked with these rel attributes will generally not be followed. Then, immediately: the linked pages may be found through other means, such as sitemaps or links from other sites, and thus they may still be crawled.

That is the whole answer. Google is telling you that the attribute affects the link, and then telling you plainly that the destination remains reachable.

There is a second layer people quote more often. In a Search Central blog announcement dated September 10, 2019, Google said the link attributes would become hints rather than strict directives: hints for ranking purposes at that point, and, as of March 1, 2020, hints for crawling and indexing purposes as well. That is where the popular line that nofollow is just a hint now comes from.

Both things are worth holding at once. Google reserves the right to use a nofollow link as a hint, and the live documentation still says such links will generally not be followed. So do not rely on nofollow to hide something, and equally do not rely on Google following a nofollow link to discover a page you actually want crawled. Neither assumption is safe.

Nofollow was never an indexing control

Think about what the attribute can physically reach. It sits on one anchor element, on one page, on your site. It can influence Google's behaviour on that one link. It cannot follow the destination URL around the web and suppress it everywhere else that URL appears.

So a page whose inbound links are all nofollow still gets indexed if any of these apply, and usually at least one does:

• The URL is listed in an XML sitemap, including one generated automatically by your CMS
• Any other site links to it without the attribute
• It is linked from your own navigation, footer or breadcrumbs, which are rarely nofollowed
• It redirects from, or is redirected to by, a URL Google already knows
• Google encountered the URL previously and kept it in its list of known pages

This is why staging environments, internal tools, thank-you pages and unlisted documents turn up in search results despite nobody linking to them deliberately. Nobody needed to. The URL existed, something mentioned it once, and no rule ever told Google to leave it out.

The rule that does control indexing

If you want a page kept out of search results, the instruction is noindex, and it goes on the page you want excluded rather than on the links pointing at it. Google's definition is unambiguous: do not show this page, media, or resource in search results.

It comes with one condition that causes more failed removals than any other single mistake. Google's robots meta documentation states that these settings can be read and followed only if crawlers are allowed to access the pages that include these settings. A noindex on a page blocked in robots.txt is never seen, because Googlebot never gets far enough to read it. The page stays in the index, often with no description, and the site owner concludes the tag is broken.

The order that works is: allow crawling, add noindex, wait for a recrawl, confirm the page has dropped, and only then block it if you still want to. A noindex checker is useful here because it reads the rendered response for both the meta tag and the X-Robots-Tag header, and headers are the part people forget they set.

The case that quietly costs traffic

The reverse problem is less discussed and more expensive: a page you do want indexed, where every link pointing at it carries the attribute.

This happens more than people expect. A product page reachable only through a filtered listing that nofollows its links. Articles promoted only on platforms that apply nofollow or ugc to every outbound link, which is standard on major social networks, marketplaces and forums. Pages linked from comment sections. A section of a site where somebody applied nofollow across a template years ago for reasons nobody remembers.

In each case the page can technically still be found through the sitemap, but the sitemap is the weakest of the discovery routes. It tells Google a URL exists and nothing else: no anchor text, no context, no signal that another page thought it was worth pointing at. Pages in that situation tend to sit in Discovered, currently not indexed for a long time, or never appear in Search Console at all.

The fix is not subtle. Give the page a real internal link from somewhere already indexed, without the attribute, with anchor text that describes the destination. That is the mechanism Google documents for discovery, and the internal linking guide covers how to find the pages on your own site that nothing points at.

Where the attributes belong

None of this is an argument against using them. Google asks for specific values in specific situations, and using the right one describes your site accurately.

Paid placements take rel="sponsored". Google's wording is direct: mark links that are advertisements or paid placements, commonly called paid links, with the sponsored value. That applies to advertising, affiliate links and sponsored posts, and it applies whether the placement came through an ad network or was arranged directly with a publisher, so anyone placing links on editorial sites should be marking them accordingly rather than hoping the distinction goes unnoticed. Google notes that nofollow was previously recommended for these and remains acceptable, though sponsored is preferred.

Anything your visitors write takes rel="ugc": comments, forum posts, reviews, profile URLs. Apply it at the template level rather than by hand. Nofollow itself is the catch-all for everything else, and multiple values can be combined as a space or comma separated list.

How to tell which situation you are actually in

Reading markup tells you what you asked for. It does not tell you what happened, and those diverge constantly.

Check the anchor element for a rel attribute, and ignore noopener and noreferrer, which are security settings with no search meaning. Check the head of the page too, because a robots meta tag containing nofollow overrides every individual link on that page at once.

Then check the outcome, because that is the part that decides whether you have a problem. A Google index checker tells you whether the URL is actually in the index right now, which separates the two failure modes cleanly. If the page was never crawled, it is a discovery problem and it needs links. If it was crawled and not indexed, links will not help and the issue is with the page itself. If it is indexed and you did not want it to be, no link attribute will fix that and you need noindex on the page.

The question of whether links need to be indexed themselves is a related but separate one, covered in do backlinks need to be indexed. For the full reference on what each attribute does, see nofollow and dofollow links.