The difference among rel=”noopener noreferrer” and rel=”nofollow”

Noreferrer noopener”, is the HTML attribute that is added to any outgoing links. What does the tag do or how will impact your SEO attempts efforts?

Suppose you’re involved in web development and search engine optimization, then chances are you have stumbled over noopener, noreferrer, or nofollow terms. What’s noopener noreferrer and nofollow? In today’s post, we will explain them and their implications on search engine optimization and security.

The difference between “noopener”, “noreferrer” and “nofollow”

On an SEO front, there is no issue to arise as the search engines don’t take the noreferrer into the account. Tag noreferrer and nofollow are two various tags. Let us get in detail and check it out!

Rel=nofollow: Tag rel=nofollow can be used for indicating neither publisher of a page to an original author will be endorsing this link & neither referred document link will be included only for the commercial purpose between the users of both the pages. Tag is invented by Google itself and the microformats community has further standardized it. The intention was when the “nofollow” link will not pass on the PageRank; spammers will quit posting any spam on the blogs. Well, it didn’t happen, and rel=nofollow continues. Many blogs ended up adding rel=nofollow on their comment links.

Rel=noreferrer: The rel=noreferrer tag indicates that no referrer information will be leaked on a link. This mainly specifies the browser not passing the HTTP referrer header in case a person clicks on a hyperlink. The clear discussion in StackExchange suggests the same. Further, when I found the discussion, people stated how it will not affect SEO.

Rel= “noopener”: Whenever you link the page to another page by using target=”_blank”, the new page runs on the same process as your page. Suppose a new web page is executing the expensive type of JavaScript, it might suffer the page’s performance as well. On the top of that, target=”_blank” might be proved safety vulnerable at times as a new page has access to the window object through window.opener, will sometimes navigate the web page to a different URL that is using an object “window.opener.location = new URL”.