Posted by Cyrus-Shepard
Google shook up the SEO world by announcing big changes to how publishers should mark nofollow links. The changes — while beneficial to help Google understand the web — nonetheless caused confusion and raised a number of questions. We’ve got the answers to many of your questions here.
14 years after its introduction, Google today announced significant changes to how they treat the “nofollow” link attribute. The big points:
Nofollow can now be specified with 3 different attributes — “nofollow”, “sponsored”, and “ugc” — each signifying a different meaning.For ranking purposes, Google now treats each of the nofollow attributes as “hints” — meaning they likely won’t impact ranking, but Google may choose to ignore the directive and use nofollow links for rankings.Google continues to ignore nofollow links for crawling and indexing purposes, but this strict behavior changes March 1, 2020, at which point Google begins treating nofollow attributes as “hints”, meaning they may choose to crawl them.
You can use the new attributes in combination with each other. For example, rel=”nofollow sponsored ugc” is valid.Paid links must either use the nofollow or sponsored attribute (either alone or in combination.) Simply using “ugc” on paid links could presumably lead to a penalty.Publishers don’t have to do anything. Google offers no incentive for changing, or punishment for not changing. P… Read More