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I have a website which contains a list of all businesses in my region. They all have a profile page that can include a Facebook or website URL.

I added rel="nofollow noopener" to all external links but it seems this is not working and Google still indexes the redirector. When I search this in Google: site:www.mijngistel.be I still see Facebook links etc.

I didn't set this in the beginning of the website but I did this change a couple months ago.

What is wrong?

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The "nofollow" doesn't stop Google from actually indexing those pages. The only thing it does is making sure that Google Authority is not being sent to that page.

The "noopener" does not have any effect on the indexing of the page. It's more of a security thing. Google says the following:

Adding a rel="noopener" attribute prevents the new page from being able to access the window.opener property

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  • Can't I stop Google crawling those external links on my website? I trying to use Google Custom Search and when I search something then also external links pop-up in the result list which I don't want. – Nanou Ponette Jun 27 '19 at 9:07
  • I've been looking at what results you're talking about and I think I see the reason why site:www.mijngistel.be shows you link to Facebook. So if I look at one of the links in the result: https://www.mijngistel.be/redirect/40/Association/FacebookUrl/ then I can see that it is still using your domain. It's indexing the redirect urls on your website because they are still part of your domain. It would be better to use direct links instead of the redirect ones. Could you show me where those links are located? – patrick Jun 27 '19 at 11:03
  • Hmm I see. Yes this in an example : mijngistel.be/profiel/vereniging/3/24-uur-van-snaaskerke But the reason why I do this is so I can track statistics on how many people click the external links. – Nanou Ponette Jun 27 '19 at 11:21
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    I am not quite sure if this will eventually fix it, but is there a way for you to turn the 302 response code into a 301 response code? Currently you get a 302 on the link, which means the content on that page is unavailable, but will return in the future. Judging from the way you use it, that's not the case here so you should be using the 301 response code. And you should also be able to track those statistics in Google Analytics. – patrick Jun 27 '19 at 12:21
  • I am using ASP MVC but I don't know how to force the response code. For the statistics, this way the user can easily see on his profilepage how many clicks Facebook, Website, Instagram, etc has. – Nanou Ponette Jun 27 '19 at 12:23

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