Google: You Don’t Hoard Anything By Nofollowing Links (It’s An SEO Myth)

Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that it is an SEO myth to say you can use the nofollow attribute on links to hoard your links. He said, “You don’t hoard anything when you make links nofollow.” “It’s a common SEO myth,” he added.

Some feel they can control how Google passes your link equity throughout your site by using the nofollow link attribute. Some call it PageRank hoarding, some call it siloing, some call it PageRank sculpting, there are many names for it.

John is saying that it doesn’t work that way. Previously he said internal PageRank sculpting is a waste of time.

Here are those tweets in context:

Lots of outbound nofollows on a blog decrease authority? #outofnowhere

— beingankyjain (@JainAnkit9) February 28, 2023

links to stats, references

— beingankyjain (@JainAnkit9) March 1, 2023

No.
But i think it’s an order to take from all and not give to rich and poor. 😐

— beingankyjain (@JainAnkit9) March 1, 2023

So thought of asking my doubt from Mighty J.🙌

— beingankyjain (@JainAnkit9) March 1, 2023

You don’t hoard anything when you make links nofollow. It’s a common SEO myth. On some sites, I suspect they just don’t trust their writers to not sell links.

— johnmu is not a chatbot yet 🐀 (@JohnMu) March 1, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.