Why it matters
The page-level nofollow rule tells search engines not to pass signals through any link on the page, a very broad rule that, as Google put it at Search Central Live, makes the page stand on its own, while an explicit robots all rule does nothing. Google recommends rel attributes on individual links so a site chooses which links to qualify; its documentation does not forbid a page-level nofollow.
How to meet it
Remove page-level nofollow and redundant all or index, follow values from template and plug-in robots meta tags; where a template uses none, replace it with noindex if the page must stay out of Search (none also means nofollow), never simply delete it. Mark individual links instead: rel="sponsored" for paid links, rel="ugc" for user-generated content and rel="nofollow" for other links you do not vouch for. nofollow is not an access control; use robots.txt to keep crawlers out (DEV-IDX-02).
How to test it
A crawl lists no page with a page-level nofollow (none included) that lacks a recorded reason, and every page that must stay out of Search still carries noindex; outbound links in comments, ads and affiliate modules carry the right rel values.
How Regensbot covers it
Decided from one URL.
An audit reads the response, the headers, the HTML, robots.txt, the sitemaps and the structured data, and the finding shows the evidence it saw.
Sources
Google documents03
- 01Qualify your outbound links to GoogleGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
- 02Evolving "nofollow" – new ways to identify the nature of linksSearch Central blog (10 September 2019) (opens in a new tab)
- 03Robots meta tag, data-nosnippet, and X-Robots-Tag specificationsGoogle Search Central (opens in a new tab)
Claims in the knowledge base06
- D2-C063ConsistentControlling indexingSaid on stage
- D2-C064ConsistentControlling indexingSaid on stage
- D2-C059ConfirmedControlling indexingShown on screen
- D1-C127SourceHow Google thinks about crawl budgetGoogle's documentation
- D2-C065n/aControlling indexingThe author's interpretation
- D2-C068ConfirmedControlling indexingSaid on stage
Claim IDs refer to the Search Central Live 2026 knowledge base. The knowledge base (opens in a new tab)
- Confirmed
- Google's documentation states the same thing.
- Consistent
- Google's documentation supports it without stating it.
- Source
- The claim is the cited document itself.
- n/a
- Nothing to verify: a quotation, framing, opinion or analysis.