nofollow on internal links is not a crawl-control tool. It stopped being one in 2019.

nofollow on internal links is not a crawl-control tool. It stopped being one in 2019.

Myth: slap nofollow on internal links to faceted pages and Google won't crawl them — classic "PageRank sculpting."

No. Two failures. First, sculpting died over a decade ago; nofollow links still consume their share, it just evaporates. Second, since 2019 nofollow is a hint, not a directive — Google may crawl and index the target anyway.

Here's the thing. If you genuinely don't want a URL crawled, robots disallow is the only reliable lever. nofollow was always the wrong tool, now doubly so.

The tradeoff: disallow blocks the crawl but blinds Google to the link. nofollow blocks nothing and confuses your own analytics.

Using internal nofollow for crawl budget in 2026 is cargo-cult SEO. The plane isn't landing.