What rel=noreferrer noopener Mean and How it Affects SEO

Learn what 'rel=noopener' and 'rel=noreferrer' do, when to use them and how they affect SEO.

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33 Comments

  1. Gordon McNevin says

    What are you thoughts on adding rel=”noreferrer noopener” to Amazon affiliate links? In this article (which really helped me BTW!) it’s states that adding this to affiliate links has no impact, but from what I understand Amazon need to be able to see all referrer information, and not being able to with give you a high chance of flagging your account, which give it a high chance of being banned. Just wondering if you or anyone has any more info on this bit? Is Amazon a special exception do you think and we should avoid this just for Amazon?

    • Lucas says

      According to Alex in this great article, the labels nofollow, noopener and noreferrer do not affect the success of the conversion.

      In my case, I use “nofollow noopener noreferrer” in all Amazon affiliate links and I have not had any problems.

  2. Alina says

    Thanks for the detail explanation about norefferr and noopener. i was worry about these tags when added to my link automatically

  3. Ashok Kumar says

    from the last time I am very confused about noreffers now I am happy after reading your post.

    Thanks 🙂

    • Alex Chris says

      Hi Arwan

      There is no reason to do this. It won’t do any harm but why should you do it?

      Thanks

  4. Rex says

    HI Alex, great article. A question here: if an interview I gave to a blog links back to my page using a ‘noreferrer’ tag, what are the implications for my DA?

    What I mean here is, if the traffic will show as direct and not referred to my site from the blog, will the links still count towards my DA score?

    Will they show as a site linking to my page for PA purposes? My thought here is no.

    My understanding is that the link will count as “a link” to my site, but even though the blog has a relatively high DA, it won’t be contributing value from that because of the ‘noreferrer’ tag. Does that sound correct?

    Many thanks,
    Rex.

    • Alex Chris says

      Hi Rex

      The link will still count. The ‘noreferrer’ tag does not change the value of a link. If any link does not have the ‘nofollow’ attribute then it means is a ‘normal’ link and will count towards your DA.

      Hope this helps
      Alex

    • Alex Chris says

      Hi Dr Shivuk

      No. You should not use these tag for internal links. It will mess up your Google analytics reports.

      Thanks
      Alex

  5. Aniket Roy says

    This is great help! this used to be such a huge confusion for me. very well explained

  6. Ranees says

    Hi, Thanks for the content which you explained about noreferer and noopener, but I have a doubt, is it good for backlinks which I built for a website?

  7. Maria says

    Thank You for this information. But I have a question.
    If i am doing internal Page Linking on my blog Post in WordPress then I Should use Open link a new tab or not?

  8. Burt says

    Please discuss accessibility. It is recommended to open links in the same tabs/windows unless you provide notice(title=”opens in a new tab”). Using noopener seems desirable for an external link, but then that doubles what I do to each external link. One page with three links – ok. 150 pages with multiple links? not so much

  9. Jon says

    A reason why someone would want to use this is if you own 2 sites that link to each other but you don’t want your analytics showing you that people got to one site from the other. This way you can be sure any hits in the ‘referral’ part of google analytics were definitely from a site you don’t already own.

  10. James Fillmore says

    Nicely Explained! Previously I thought that noopener and nofollow are the same things! but your explanation has cleared my wrong thought. Thanks for sharing this helpful content with us.

  11. Robin Khokhar says

    Hi Alex,
    Thanks for clearing the confusion. It was really helpful.
    Thanks for the share.
    Have a good week ahead.

  12. Shaun says

    Hello Chris,

    I have few doubts:

    Is it fine to use nofollow, noopener and noreferer together or any combination of noopener or noreferer with the nofollow tag correspondingly?

    And secondly does using noreferer in internal linking harm SEO in any way?

    Thanks in advance!

  13. anonyms says

    Hi!
    Man just perfectly explained. Everything is clear right now. Few minutes ago, when I first saw something like noopener & noreferrer I was super confused. After reading your article now I’m good to create links.
    Main thing is both noopener & nooreferrer links are do follow.

    • Alex Chris says

      Hi Daisy

      The noopener tag does not affect how the link will open. By default, all links open in the same tab unless you define target=”_blank”.

      I hope this helps
      Alex

  14. Halina Biernacki says

    Clearly amplifies the internal gears of linking atributes. TU

    I completed the SEO Course but still rely on all your articles & videos to stay on track.

  15. Rufy Ashta says

    Your article is awesome. I got clarity on noreferrer-noopener tag a lot.

    Can you please clear one confusion also?
    Can we build backlinks on those sites, who provide only “noreferrer-noopener” tag only?

    Thanks for sharing

  16. jack thomas says

    Hi,

    I loved this post focused on rel noopener. The reason I came here was in medium they use noopener especially in the about us section. To be fair I didn’t know about this tag. In fact I came to know that there is also a tag called rel=”noreferrer”. This is really a great piece of content that is highly valuable.

    Really worthy content to read, Technical stuff in SEO is interesting to learn and build knowledge. Loved it❤️

  17. m7mmad says

    I was worried that the attribute rel=”noreferrer” would be treated like nofollow, thanks for the information, I was going to make a big mistake 🙂

    Great read btw.

  18. David McMurrey says

    Thanks for this, Alex. I don’t want my course pages to end up showing in search. Is that a re=”noindex”? — David

    • Alex Chris says

      Hi David

      No, if you don’t want a page to appear in search, you need to add the noindex meta tag. Read this for more details.

      Thanks
      Alex

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