Noopener

The addition rel=”noopener” to a link is a security measure that prevents the target website from making changes for the executing user by invoking its link on the linking website.

Definition

If a web page A links to a second web page B with a backlink , the command target:”_blank” can be added to the outgoing link by the webmaster. This addition causes the tab of web page A to remain open and web page B to open in a second tab.

In addition, the addition rel=”noopener” should be used, so that the website B cannot make any changes to A.

What is the purpose of the noopener command?

If the link leads to a malicious web page, web page B can make changes to web page A, which is still open, through functions of JavaScript. The changes from website B to website A are only visible to the user who clicked on the link. Therefore, they do not affect the website A itself.

Nevertheless, website B can change the URL of website A in such a way that the user can be redirected to a phishing page via website A.

If the webmaster of the page adds the rel: “noopener” command to the outgoing links, the website to which the link leads can no longer make any changes to the linking page. This prevents third parties from making technical changes to a linking page.

What is the difference between noopener and nofollow?

For the world of search engine optimization, the nofollow attribute is crucial. Google’s guidelines state that any link that leads from a promotional content to a landing page should be marked with the nofollow attribute. By adding nofollow to a link, this link is marked as commercial for Google’s crawler and is not followed by it and therefore does not flow into Google’s trust rating.

Unlike nofollow, the noopener attribute has no effect on the crawler or Google’s algorithm. Therefore, webmasters can add the noopener attribute to outbound links without fear that their Technical SEO efforts will get in the way of the rest of their work. The addition noopener does not influence the search engine result of Google of the page in any way.

Conclusion

The attritbut noopener is a good security measure that prevents a third party website from making changes to yours for visitors. Since the attribute does not affect the search engine optimization of the page, there is no reason not to use the noopener attribute to protect your own page.