Do “noopener noreferrer” links count as backlinks?

Question

I have bought ad links in some websites with a link, but when I saw the sites, they add an attribute noopener noreferrer on my website link.

Does Google count this as backlink?

Answer 1

Be worried... that your links do not use nofollow

Personally I'd be more worried about the fact they do not use rel="nofollow", paid links must use nofollow otherwise your going to feel the full wrath of Google's Penguin.

Google Search Console is not Realtime

Google Search Console can take several weeks to months to update the data within your Dashboard, particularly backlinks.

Google does not reveal all links to your sites... purposely.

The information provided in the link area of the dashboard is only a snippet of your real link profile, Google purposely do not display all backlinks for one reason and more. Small sites with lesser links will display less links than a big site with many links.

Backlinks take time... to be discovered

Often paid links will appear on sites with thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pages and unless your paid link is on the front page, it can take several weeks, even months and on some massive sites with no authority, never.

What is nofollow? noreferrer? and noopener?

Below you can find various sources with the information that will help you understand what each attribute do.

Source: Use rel="nofollow" for specific links

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

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Source: What is the difference between “nofollow” and “noreferrer” link from SEO perspective?

The difference is that, in theory, rel="noreferrer" should not have any SEO impact, while nofollow clearly specifies that the link does not endorse in any way the target URL.

nofollow was invented by Google back in 2005 in order to fight comment spam in blogs, any URL appearing in the comment section would not pass PR to the target webpage.

rel="noreferrer" mainly affects analytics, how did this visit landed to this page? where comes it from? noreferrer specifies to hide that kind of information.

I said in theory because there is currently no official documentation that explicitly indicates using noreferral would change anything in SEO terms, but it shouldn't.

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Source: Opens External Anchors Using rel="noopener"

When your page links to another page using target="_blank", the new page runs on the same process as your page. If the new page is executing expensive JavaScript, your page's performance may also suffer.

On top of this, target="_blank" is also a security vulnerability. The new page has access to your window object via window.opener, and it can navigate your page to a different URL using window.opener.location = newURL.

You can find out more about these link attributes on Template Toaster