Some SEO’s (myself included) have for years theorized that Google does assign some value to nofollow links. Even though the world’s most popular search engine has denied this, the result of many years of testing have spoken for themselves in contradiction to what the “Don’t Be Evil” company has publicly stated.
Now, for the first time Google is saying that in the future, nofollow links will provide a “hint” to their ranking algorithm.
According to Search Engine Journal, “Google announced a major change to how nofollow links are counted. Previously nofollow links were treated as a directive, meaning Google obeyed the nofollow, period. Starting today, for ranking purposes, Google is treating nofollow as a hint. This means that Google will decide whether to use the link for ranking purposes or not. This change impacts on-page SEO, content marketing, link building and link spam.”
The nofollow link was introduced in 2005 in order to combat comment spam on blogs and message boards (WordPress was launched in 2003).
Along with Google’s announcement come a couple of other interesting changes including the introduction of the rel=”sponsored” link and the rel=”ugc” link.
According to Search Engine Land:
rel=”sponsored“: The new sponsored attribute can be used to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
rel=”ugc“: The ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
So what does this mean for SEO’s and business owners? Google
says there should be no significant impact to search results (maybe perhaps
since this isn’t really new, only newly acknowledged). Then again, if the scope
of the weight of the nofollow links is expanded such as internal linking on
Woocommerce sites or say links from Wikipedia, then this could lead to some
interesting bounces in the SERPs. Once again we’ll have to wait and see how
this all shakes out in the months to come.
Citations
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify.html
https://searchengineland.com/google-to-treat-nofollow-link-attribute-as-a-hint-after-march-1-2020-321664
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-nofollow-hints-seo/325363/
https://wordpress.org/support/article/history/
