Google Will Process nofollow on HTML link Tags
https://twitter.comApparently Google bot will process nofollow on HTML <link> tags. This is specific to <link> tags not to be confused with <a> tags, we all know that they can process nofollow on those. If you don’t specify a nofollow, the URL from href will be extracted as a weightless outlink.
You might have seen the <link> tags in the <head> of the document for things like RSS feed, hreflang, stylesheet, fonts etc.
With this Google will understand that you are specifying it as a nofollow link but since that is a hint and not a directive, it’s really up to Goole if it ends up being not followed.
Also, this is only in relation to the traditional google bot other indexing and processing systems like the ones used for sitemaps might handle it differently.
It’s also worth noting that according to W3C standard nofollow is NOT allowed for the link tag.
