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I noticed that one website that I own uses rel="noreferrer" in all the links pointing to the same domain (so trustworthy links not outgoing)

<a href="/blog" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer">Blog</a>

In my understanding this is wrong and damages the internal linking... I am not sure why the developer did this or maybe I am wrong and it is fine to use noreferrer for internal links.

I have two questions

  1. Can you explain to me some more information about what is the best practice for links that you trust and belong to the same domain ?
  2. Should I remove the noreferrer from these links or let it be ?

I googled before and could find only information about noopener noreferrer but not only about noreferrer alone.

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  • Hi Kristi, if noreferrer is used for internal links then it is recommended to remove them, also remove the target _blank. Because both of these attributes are for outgoing links but not for the internal ones. "noreferrer" prevents passing the referrer information to the target website by removing the referral info from the HTTP header. This means that in Google analytics traffic coming from links that have the rel=”noreferrer” attribute will show as Direct Traffic instead of Referral.
    – Deepak Mathur
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 1:46
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    @DeepakMathur thanks a lot Deepak. On point answer that explains hand-on what happens. I removed them then because I want to know the referrer header and see that it was internal linking instead of seeing "direct traffic" which is wrong. Regarding the target _blank, why is that bad to use internally ? I thought that it was ok to open another tab with target _blank if you don't want the user to leave the previous one and cause bounce rate or something like that
    – Kristi Jorgji
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 16:52

2 Answers 2

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Here's the explanation regarding your queries.

In my understanding this is wrong and damages the internal linking... I am not sure why the developer did this or maybe I am wrong and it is fine to use noreferrer for internal links.

Yes, you're right this is wrong implementation.

Can you explain to me some more information about what is the best practice for links that you trust and belong to the same domain ?

If links are of same domain which we call internal links, then you need not to add any attribute, in your given example there I can see target = "_blank" this attribute is to open links in new tab which is not suggested for internal links, this you can use for external links also known as outgoing links

Should I remove the noreferrer from these links or let it be ?

Yes, remove both attributes target = "_blank"

Your internal link should look like

<a href="https://www.example.com/blog">Blog</a>

I've also suggested to use absolute URLs instead of relative URLs. That will be different topic to discuss but in short, absolute URLs are easy to crawl, this is to help crawlers find the whole path easily.

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    I disagree with the absolutes on attributes on the link tag. However, it is a good explanation deserving of +1
    – Rohit Gupta
    Commented Aug 20, 2023 at 12:32
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When all links have noreferrer and target _blank, that says that the developer did not know what they were doing. However, I disagree about absolutes on link attributes. There are cases where they are desirable.

  1. rel="nofollow" could be used on an internal link to indicate to the search engines, not to follow the link because you don't want it indexed. Of course, it would be best for the destination page to have a meta tag of noindex.

  2. target="_blank" can be used if it makes sense to open the link on a new page. Two of my banks do this to start a fresh session, for logging in and beyond. I too have used it sporadically when it would confuse the user to open it on the same page. Many sites do this and often an icon of a box with an arrow is used to indicate to this to the user.

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