Should Internal Links Be No Follow or Do Follow?

Internal links are an important part of an SEO strategy. They help Google understand how your content is related so it gets a better idea of your authority.

However, there’s a lot of confusion around the types of links you should be using.

Should you use do follow links, which means Google can see them? Or no follow links, which means Google can’t see them?

Like many things in SEO the answer is: it depends!

But there’s a clear cut reason is depends.

And if you do it correctly, internal links can massively improve your SEO strategy. I dedicated 1 of my 6 months in my strategy to get into Mediavine to adding internal links. In the end it only took a few afternoons thanks to Link Whisper, but I immediately saw traffic returns!

Should You Do Follow or No Follow Internal Links for SEO?

You should make your internal links do follow IF they are topically relevant, beneficial to the reader, and have strong anchor text.

You should make internal links no follow if they are links you’d make money off of it (aka. cloaked affiliate links).

Many of us – myself included – use link cloakers for our affiliates. That makes affiliate links look like they’re internal links.

For example, sheknowsseo.co/recommends/lyrical is my Lyrical Host affiliate link. But because it uses my domain name, it looks like an internal links.

I no follow all of these links automatically within Pretty Links‘ free plugin.

You may also want to no follow internal links if:

• You’re going to link to it later in the post with better/more relevant anchor text
• It’s a sales page for a course/product (some people do this because they count it as something they’re making money off of. I don’t because it’s not sponsored or affiliate income. Ecommerce stores don’t no follow or no index their product pages, so I see it the same way)
• It’s a link in your menu or footer that would look spammy to have links to from your entire site (typically people use these spots for link juice, so this would be a unique case)

Why Do We Want Internal Links to Be Do Follow?

Internal links should be do follow so Google can see the connection between the posts on your site.

Internal links are like the roads connecting your content. If Google is going to go on a road trip through your site, they need a way to get from point A to point B. And knowing that these two points are near each other, also shows Google their relation.

Sure, the algorithm is smart and can use semantic SEO to connect “things to do in Rome” to “Rome places to stay”. But it’s lazy, kinda like us. So if we can help it make that connection faster and more clearly, it’ll pay more attention.

It’s kinda like how the barista at a coffee shop will pay you more attention if you’re nice to them.

Help Google help you, and you’ll notice it figures out your authority faster.

These links also help with EEAT, by proving our expertise as authors on a topic.

If you only write 1 post on Rome, Google doesn’t care about you.

But if you write 20 posts on Rome, Google realizes you must have actually studied up a bit or visited there.

Just publishing those 20 posts won’t help though if Google doesn’t understand that they all exist on your site. We need to connect them so Google realizes they’re related.

How to Tell if a Link is Do Follow or No Follow

Not sure if your internal links are do follow or no follow?

There are a few ways to check.

1. Check in your editor

In the Gutenberg editor, you can see if a link is do follow or no follow by clicking on the link, clicking on the “edit” pencil and then seeing if you have checked “no follow”.

You can also check in the HTML editor if it has the tag “rel=nofollow” added to it.

2. Check the code

In Chrome, if you highlight text and right click on it, there’s an option to “inspect”. This will allow you to see the code for that section of the page to see if the link is do or no follow.

Here’s what it looks like when it’s do follow:

Here’s what it looks like when it’s no follow:

3. Use the Ahrefs Chrome Extension

The free Chrome extension shows you what links are do follow or no follow on a page.

I set it to “internal” and “no follow” to see which links on my posts are marked as no follow at a glance.

It looks like this:

Treat Internal Links Like Backlinks

Internal links are like 50% of a backlink in my mind.

There’s no studies I’ve found so far that have proven exactly how powerful an internal link is, so this is just a metric I use for example purposes.

For a blog post to rank, especially early on with a new site, you need recognition. Some of that needs to be external, but some can be internal too.

I’d rather add 10 internal links and build 1 backlink than have to do it the other way around.

But for those links to pass authority, the link needs to be do follow – just like a link you build from a guest post should be do follow.

It’s kind of like lifting the dam so all the link juice can flow through. No follow puts the dam in place and blocks it from reaching the linked post.

Conclusion

If you’ve marked your internal links as no follow, you’re going to need to fix that immediately.

Unfortunately most tools that input no follow links can’t remove them after the fact, so you’ll need to manually go through and remove the tag.

This is frustrating, I know. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes over the years – like making all of my internal links open in a new tab. I had to fix those manually.

I recommend planning a movie night or watching some trash TV and doing it at the same time.

You’d be surprised how much power internal links give your site. I know it sounds like a tedious thing and you may want to skip it, but I urge you to make the change immediately.

And in future, ensure you don’t no follow the links.

I use Link Whisper to help with mine, and it’s an option in their settings that I have turned off. I share all my settings for the tool here so you can see how I have it set up.

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