Webflow & Nofollow Links for SEO

In Nov 2023, the Webflow team awesomely slipped in two much asked-for SEO features, which include the ability to suppress certain pages from search-engine indexing, and the ability to add rel=nofollow on individual links.

Suppress pages from your sitemap

Nov 6th announcement, read more here.

Under the SEO part of page settings, you can choose to toggle off sitemap publishing for a page or collection page. This does two things-

1. removes the page from the auto-generated sitemap, and
2. adds a noindex META tag to the page.

Note that you must be using the auto-generated sitemap for this switch to be enabled. You cannot use a custom sitemap and then use this switch to only add the META noindex. [ 30-Nov-2023 ]

Suppressing individual collection item pages

If you want suppress individual collection items, you'll likely still need to use a custom code approach to apply the noindex META. If you want to remove them from the autogen sitemap, you'll need a reverse proxy.

Contact us if you need help with that.

Adding rel=nofollow to links

In a rich text element you can now select any link and the settings popup includes a Rel option. In the Webflow editor, it looks like this;

So what can you do with it?

The rel attribute in an HTML link ( <a> tag ) specifies the relationship between the current document and the linked document.

You can specify several of these on the same link, separated by spaces, such as nofollow noopener noreferrer.

Here are some common settings;

Common SEO Rels

• _nofollow tells search engines not to follow the link, which means the link will not contribute to the search ranking of the target site. It's used for links that should not pass link equity.
• _sponsored indicates that the link is part of an advertisement or sponsorship. This attribute is used to identify links that are advertisements or paid placements, distinguishing them from organic links.
• _ugc stands for User Generated Content, and signifies that the link appears within user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts. This attribute helps search engines understand that the link may not be editorially placed by the site owner.

In Webflow's rel= implementation, you would always be adding this manually through the designer, editor, or CMS, which means by definition, it's probably not "user generated content" unless you're feeding it through the API from a separate commenting system.

Browser Controls

• _noopener prevents the new page from being able to access the window.opener property and ensures it runs in a separate process.
• _noreferrer prevents the browser from sending the HTTP referrer header. Use this when you do not want the identified site to know the origin of the click.

Informational Rels

These probably aren't very relevant today, or have been replaced by Open Graph METAs.

• _author indicates that the link leads to the author of the document.
• _license indicates that the link is related to a license for the material.
• _tag indicates that the link is related to a tag (keyword/subject) for the current document.
• _external indicates that the link leads to an external site.
• _bookmark identifies a permanent URL used for bookmarking.

Learn More

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify

https://moz.com/blog/nofollow-sponsored-ugc

https://backlinko.com/nofollow-link

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/ranking-factors/nofollow-links/

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