In the course of pursuing a high authority backlink, search engine optimization professionals may come across certain tags added to their URLs by website administrators. To SEO practitioners who are not familiar with these HTML attributes, seeing a "noreferrer noopener" may look too much like the dreaded "nofollow" link, which can have a direct impact on SEO even though it can still drive significant traffic to web pages.
As the syntax of the tag implies, "noreferrer" directs the browser to refrain transmission of the referring website information. In essence, the HTTP header or referring URL would be stripped of certain information. As for "noopener," it is an instruction to execute an "open new tab" command, and it is a standard feature of the WordPress content management system.
The use of "noopener" by itself denotes that the inbound link could come from a WP website, and this is generally good news for the target site. There is absolutely no impact on SEO if the target opens in a new tab because the Google search engine algorithm does not take it into consideration. As of "noreferrer," a similar situation applies; this is not something that Google accounts for when it sends its crawlers across the internet. If anything, the use of these two tags together denote that the referrer is practicing basic internet security by means of reducing the likelihood of a cross-site scripting malicious attack.
For some SEO professionals, the "noreferrer" tag presents a problem in the sense that it will show up as "Direct Traffic" instead of the actual website when pulling up analytics reports. This could be problematic when working with clients who have retained backlink generation services, but it will not have any effect on the "SEO juice" extracted from the inbound link, which means that it will gain rank on the Google search engine results page as expected.
Even the "nofollow" tag is not as dreaded as some SEO specialists suggest. Let's say the New York Times posts one of these links in a positive review of a Chinese restaurant; you know that such an article will bring many visitors, and the positive context would only be good for business even if no rank is gained on the SERP. For more information click here https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/ho2r3o/backlinktomysiteisarelnoreferrer_noopener/.