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Using "nofollow" internally can help with crawl budget?
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Hello everyone.
I was reading this article on semrush.com, published the last year, and I'd like to know your thoughts about it:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/does-google-crawl-relnofollow-at-all/
Is that really the case? I thought that Google crawls and "follows" nofollowed tagged links even though doesn't pass any PR to the destination link. If instead Google really doesn't crawl internal links tagged as "nofollow", can that really help with crawl budget?
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Thank you Oleg for confirming. I think a lot of people should be aware of this as well!
Thank you again.
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I've always treated it as such and their case study seems to confirm it. You can't sculpt link authority with it, but you can control the crawl budget better.
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