Should you nofollow internal links to low-value pages to focus equity?
- Published November 6, 2026
- Linked from 2 answers
- In a cluster of 3
No. The idea, known as PageRank sculpting, assumed that a nofollowed link’s share of a page’s value would be passed to the page’s other links instead. Google had already changed that when Matt Cutts, then at Google, explained it in a June 2009 post: the change, made more than a year earlier, meant the followed links on a page no longer received the share that the nofollowed links would have had. Since 2019, Google also treats nofollow as a hint rather than a strict instruction. Adding nofollow to internal links therefore does not concentrate anything on your important pages, and it gives Google a confusing signal about your own site.
What to use instead
| Goal | Tool that works |
|---|---|
| Keep a page out of search results | noindex on the page |
| Stop Google crawling a section that should not be crawled | A robots.txt rule (Google's own guidance for links within your site) |
| Give a page less prominence | Link to it less, and from less prominent places |
| Give important pages more prominence | Link to them more, from related content and hub pages |
| Remove pages that serve no one | Delete or merge them |
Google’s guidance on qualifying outbound links points to robots.txt, not nofollow, when you need to stop Google fetching a page on your own site. nofollow’s main purpose is links to other sites that you do not vouch for or that were paid for; it is not forbidden on internal links, but it is no tool for steering ranking value between your own pages.
Why structure beats sculpting
How prominent a page is within a site comes from the links you choose to give it. Google’s ecommerce guidance reads the links a site gives a page as a clue to how much the site values it. That puts the lever in your linking choices: link generously to the pages that matter, sparingly to pages that do not, and leave the links you keep as normal links.
What about utility pages?
Links to privacy, terms and contact pages are the first place sculpting advice points, and they do not need it; that case has a page of its own, whether linking to your privacy and terms pages wastes link equity. Outbound links raise the mirror question: whether linking out to authoritative sites helps or leaks value. Decide for each low-value page whether it belongs in search at all, apply noindex if it does not, and shape everything else through where you link.
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