Are noreferrer and noopener attributes affecting my backlinks or outgoing links in terms of SEO?
Short answer: No
Noreferrer, noopener, and nofollow are not related to each other. Each attribute has its own purpose. Let’s look at what each is used for.
Noreferrer
Noreferrer is related to analytics and tracking. The referrer value shows the previous page where a user came from. By using the noreferrer attribute on a link, you are preventing other pages from seeing that traffic came from a click on your link.
Example:
<a href="https://www.website.com" rel="noreferrer">Link to yoursite.com</a>
Impact on SEO: 0, but may impact analytics and tracking.
Noopener
Noopener is related to security. It closes a browser security issue called reverse tab nabbing which lets an attacker have partial access to the previous page and is typically used when a link is set to open in a new tab with target="_blank".
Note: With the release of Chrome 88, all links with target="_blank" will be treated as noopener.
Example:
<a href="https://www.website.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Link to yoursite.com</a>
Impact on SEO: 0
Nofollow
The nofollow attribute was used in the past to tell search engines to simply ignore a link. Google would not crawl these links and did not pass value through them. Their treatment of nofollow links changed in 2020 and now it’s more complicated. They treat nofollow as a hint, which means they can choose to crawl and pass value through them, or not.
Impact on SEO: it depends on whether they decide the links are valuable or not. There’s no way to determine which links they use and which they do not.
Example:
<a href="https://www.website.com" rel="nofollow">Link to yoursite.com</a>
You can get more useful info about nofollow links from here: