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[1] significant changes to how they treat the "nofollow" link attribute. The big points:
- Link attribution can be done in three ways: "nofollow", "sponsored", and "ugc" — each signifying a different meaning. (The fourth way, default, means no value attributed)
- 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.
- Publishers using nofollow to control crawling may need to reconsider their strategy.
Why did Google change nofollow?
Google wants to take back the link graph.
Google introduced[2] the nofollow attribute in 2005 as a way for publishers to address comment spam and shady links