---
canonical: "https://www.jsolly.com/blog/use-noopener-norferrer-to-improve-user-privacy/"
title: "Protect User Privacy With the Noreferrer and Noopener Link Attributes"
description: "Learn how to protect user privacy on your website with HTML link attributes noreferrer and noopener in this informative article."
author: "John Solly"
published: "2022-07-28T20:25:37.762Z"
updated: "2022-07-28T20:25:37.762Z"
---
# Protect User Privacy With the Noreferrer and Noopener Link Attributes
Today I am going to talk about these three values of the `rel` attribute for HTML links.
- noreferrer
- noopener
I'll point you to [this article](https://blog.templatetoaster.com/noopener-noreferrer/) for a deep dive on [noreferrer](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types/noreferrer) and [noopener](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Link_types/noopener) (And I've just linked you to the MDN docs on the attributes).
The gist of them is that they protect users from being tracked across websites. See, whenever a link is clicked, the default behavior is that information about the current window and domain are passed to the target window and target domain. By using these properties together, traffic to linked sites behave like direct traffic instead of backlinks.
For example, if someone clicks on my LinkedIn profile link from the homepage, LinkedIn opens in a new tab.
<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/jsolly/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Linkedin</a>
But from LinkedIn's perspective, it looks like they visited the URL directly (instead of coming from blogthedata.com) because `referrer` and `window.opener` are cleared out. This is nice for users because it improves their cross-site privacy.
Add these attributes to external links today to increase the privacy of your users!
July 28, 2022 in [Web Dev](https://www.jsolly.com/blog/category/web-dev/)
Updated July 28, 2022