Mistake: nofollow on internal links to "sculpt crawl"

Mistake: nofollow on internal links to "sculpt crawl"

Old habit that won't die: slap rel=nofollow on internal links to faceted nav, login, or cart, expecting it to stop Googlebot crawling them and conserve budget.

No. Since 2019 Google treats nofollow as a hint, not a directive — it may crawl and index those links anyway. And even back when it was strict, nofollow never reliably blocked the crawl; it just dropped link equity. PageRank sculpting died over a decade ago.

The fix: if you don't want a URL crawled, disallow it in robots.txt — that's the actual lever. If you don't want it indexed, noindex it. Nofollow is for untrusted external links, not internal traffic control.

Google has said this repeatedly.

Nofollow is a suggestion to a crawler that no longer takes suggestions on this.