Nofollow and Link Rel Checker
See which links are nofollow, sponsored or ugc, which are internal, and which combinations do not make sense.
About this tool
Lists every link on a page with the rel attributes it declares, split between internal and external, and flags the combinations that are usually mistakes.
Two things are worth finding here.
**Internal links marked nofollow.** Almost always a plugin applying a rule too widely. It does nothing useful — you are telling a search engine not to follow a link to your own page, which it will follow anyway from somewhere else — and it makes the site's own link structure harder to read.
**Paid or user-generated links without the right rel.** Since 2019 `sponsored` and `ugc` exist to say why a link is not an endorsement, and a paid link carrying nothing at all is a disclosure problem before it is an SEO one. This tool cannot tell which of your links are paid; it can show you the external ones and let you check.
Also flagged: `target="_blank"` without `rel="noopener"`, where the opened page can reach back into yours through `window.opener`.
Common questions
Is nofollow still a directive?
No. Google treats it as a hint for crawling and indexing rather than a rule, and has since 2019. It still signals that you are not endorsing the link, which is the part that matters for paid placements.
When should I use sponsored instead of nofollow?
Sponsored for anything paid — advertising, affiliate links, paid placements. ugc for links your users create, such as comments and forum posts. Both can be combined with nofollow, and doing so is the safe option.
Why is nofollow on internal links a problem?
It is not harmful so much as pointless. The old practice of sculpting internal link flow with nofollow stopped working over a decade ago, and what remains is a plugin rule nobody revisited. It obscures your own site structure for no benefit.
What does noopener actually prevent?
A page opened with target="_blank" can use window.opener to navigate the page that opened it — a phishing route. Modern browsers imply noopener for _blank, but older ones do not, and being explicit costs nothing.