A nofollow meta tag is an HTML directive placed in a page’s head section instructing search engines not to follow any of the outbound links on that specific page, distinct from a nofollow attribute applied to an individual link.
This page-level directive is less commonly used than individual link-level nofollow attributes, but can be useful for pages containing many outbound links a site owner doesn’t want to pass any link equity through, such as certain directory or resource pages.
Understanding the distinction between page-level and link-level nofollow directives helps ensure the intended crawling and link equity behavior is actually implemented correctly.
We review meta directive usage as part of our Technical SEO service.