: Will adding a 'nofollow' attribute to links on my homepage result in crawling issues? On my homepage I have three links that link back to my homepage. That means that a loop of links is

@Eichhorn148

Links that refresh the page are not an SEO problem. Most sites have clickable logos that take you to the home page. On most sites that logo link is still there on the home page and it refreshes the page. Google is used to sites that do that and it never causes any SEO problems.

Nofollow doesn't work like you want for duplicate links. When you put a nofollow on a link, Google distrusts all duplicate links too. It's like putting it on one link puts it on all three. Google's logic is: "If they say I can't trust the link here, why should I trust it in these other places on the same page?"

Google has recommended that you never use nofollow on internal links. I completely agree with that recommendation now. When you nofollow your own links, it:


Can royally mess up your site getting crawled and indexed, often in unexpected ways
Causes Google to trust your site less
Doesn't change PageRank and other ranking factors in any meaningful way
Doesn't resolve errors

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@Angela700

Do not use nofollow attribute as a workaround to the JavaScript error, even if you implement the nofollow attribute you will still have the same error.

Nofollow attribute is there to control indexing and serving by search engines. Most search engines will interpret the nofollow link in different ways, affecting the overall site structure and how they understand the information you provide.

For example, rel=Nofollow links has been created to help webmasters to tell Google when NOT to pay attention to external references, documents or web pages related to the information they are sharing and they believe will not help the user or do not endorse. Also, if you are paying for ads with links to your site and that are surrounded by content or other ads that you don’t want to be associated with your website you use nofollow links. Also, if you read this post you will notice that you can tell Google not to crawl specific section of your website that you don’t really need to index such as authorised users only pages where login is required.

The homepage must be accessible or crawlable from everywhere in your website, it is expected. We don’t really know the exact consequences, but you will definitely will have crawling issues and errors will be reported in search engine Console.

Google expects you to use nofollow in certain ways, is the way he understands the content you provide, not to use it in cases you want to overcome a JavaScript issue. Any use of this property other than those explained in the above link will be seeing as an attempt to manipulate PageRank, even if that was not your intention.

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