How to Fix External Links Contain No-follow Attributes Let’s look at the issue of outgoing external links with a no-follow attribute. This is similar to another SEMrush issue that is actually a warning.
This one is a notice since it occurs 99 times out of a hundred. This is not an issue. It’s something you might want to include on your website.
A no-follow attribute to an external site is something you add to a link to notify Google, “Hey, ignore this link to this other website. I’m not trying to pass any SEO authority onto this other website.”
This does not represent a vote of confidence in that website. I’m merely linking to it for whatever reason, but I’m not claiming this as an authority website, which is fairly frequent.
No-follow attributes and external links have a long history in SEO. I’m not going to dig into it because it can be quite complicated. But this is only going to be a little concern.
I would argue that if you have a lot of them, if you have a website with a hundred pages and you have more than a dozen or so of these, then that’s when it becomes an issue.
So, once you’ve got them, go ahead and go to the details page, and you’ll see in the first column where the link is, and in the second column where that link goes.
But what you really want to do is go to the link or the page in question and look at that link. I believe that the best method to deal with these is to apply the rule of thumb: If the link leads to a website that you believe is of high quality then remove the no-follow attribute.
If it connects to a website that you believe is suspicious, even if it isn’t a high authority domain (i.e: it could be a little-known blog or something similar) then the no-follow attribute is appropriate. You are free to include it.
So, in order to do so, we’d click on this URL. And this links to, in this example, Google, but there is a no-follow attribute on there, and if you go into the page editor and scroll down until you find that link, find the part with that link, just click on it.
And then, above, in the menu, you’ll notice a small link icon, click that, and then click on the gear icon that comes beneath it, and you’ll see a couple of checkboxes beneath that link to remove the no-follow. Simply uncheck the box next to the line that says “add a rel=no follow to link,” click update, and then save the page.
That notice will vanish once you restart your SEO audit. If you have links being reported here that you wish to leave but do not want to modify, simply leave the no-follow attribute alone, and most of the time, that’s probably fine.
Simply place a checkmark next to the row in question and then select Hide Selected. And all that will happen is that this particular issue will be hidden from the SEO audit the next time it is done.
That will be beneficial as it will provide you with greater precision. It will boost your SEO score slightly and provide you with a more accurate, exact reflection of what is going on.
Another alternative if you have a lot of them that you’d like to hide, there is an icon at the far right within each row that if you scroll is a tiny eyeball with a line across that does the same thing if you click on it.
