# Search engines now blocked from indexing non-canonical pages

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-engines-now-blocked-from-indexing-non-canonical-pages/218985
**Category:** Announcements
**Tags:** seo
**Created:** [February 21, 2022, 7:35pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-engines-now-blocked-from-indexing-non-canonical-pages/218985 "2022-02-21T19:35:37Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 9

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### Author: ![j127](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/j127/32/79093_2.png) [@j127](https://meta.discourse.org/u/j127)
#### Post date: [February 22, 2022, 5:20am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/search-engines-now-blocked-from-indexing-non-canonical-pages/218985/9 "2022-02-22T05:20:46Z")

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> [@rrit](#):
>
> May we add `<a rel="nofollow" …>` to all links doing this topic-answer deep-linking? Thereby we might save even more of this precious and limited crawl budget of search engines:  
> the search engine would neither extract the link in the first place nor do a call to the url. As calling the url results in a response with a `X-Robots-Tag: noindex` http-header causing the response to be ‘trashed’ by adding the url to the search engines internal ‘noindex’-list.

I agree with the first part of your post, but I don’t think internal `nofollow` is ideal. Internal links help tell search engines which pages on the site are important. Google isn’t going to follow every link it sees, because it knows that it’s seen them before. If they see a URL like `example.com/t/1234/5` but have already crawled it and knows that its `canonical` URL is `example.com/t/1234`, they probably aren’t going to waste their computing resources visiting the non-canonical version multiple times.

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