The fix, in one snippet
<a href="/guides/arch-support">Arch support</a>Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
Every internal link is checked for rel="nofollow", and the source and target of each one is reported. Links to other domains are not included; nofollow on an external link is a legitimate and common choice.
Why it matters
Nofollow was designed for links you do not vouch for: user-submitted content, paid placements, untrusted output. Applied to your own navigation it says you do not vouch for your own pages.
The old practice of "PageRank sculpting", using nofollow to funnel authority to chosen pages, stopped working in 2009 when Google changed how the value of a nofollowed link is handled: the authority is no longer redistributed to the remaining links, it is simply discarded. Since 2019 nofollow has been treated as a hint rather than a directive, so the link may be followed anyway, but the signal it could have carried is still weakened.
Most internal nofollows today are leftovers from that era, or a CMS plugin applying one rule to every link on the page.
How to fix it
Remove rel="nofollow" from links to your own content:
<!-- before -->
<a href="/guides/arch-support" rel="nofollow">Arch support</a>
<!-- after -->
<a href="/guides/arch-support">Arch support</a>To keep a page out of the index, use a noindex directive on that page rather than nofollowing every link to it. To stop a crawler reaching a section at all, use robots.txt. Both are the right tool; nofollow is not.
Keep nofollow where it belongs: user-generated links (rel="ugc") and paid or affiliate links (rel="sponsored").
Where this fits
Internal links marked nofollow is check 2 of 7 that the seo & site health audit runs under links and site structure, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Broken internal links (high), where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
Internal links marked nofollow closes one route in. Immediately below it: Orphan pages, where a page nothing links to is reachable only by knowing its address; Pages with little internal link support, where pages that almost nothing links to inherit almost no authority, however good they are; Generic or empty anchor text, where "Click here" describes the action, not the destination.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error, and Duplicate body content, where two pages with identical body text are one page at two addresses, and search engines will pick one of them for you. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Internal links marked nofollow (medium severity)
Scanner check id: seo-nofollow-internalThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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