Google On Links For Republishing My Content

Aug 7, 2018 - 7:59 am 4 by

Google Links

As you know, Danny Sullivan is somewhat new to working at Google - for decades he worked from the other end of the field, from the SEO industries perspective. Now he is working for Google and has to explain Google's position on guidelines and why they do what they do. It must be super weird for Danny because it is super weird for me to read his responses.

This may be the first time he tackled a link nofollow vs follow guideline question in detail on Twitter. It was triggered by a question from Rand Fishkin:

I believe if John Mueller would have answered it, he would have responded in one tweet and one tweet alone and said something like, they should not be required to have to use a follow link and you probably should tell them to use a nofollow attribute on the link. But Danny didn't answer it that way. Here are Danny's tweets:

Again, two different people, two different ways to answer it. If it was me, and I was working for Google (I am not going to work for Google), I would have said, you should not require in your licensing agreement to use follow links. I know many sites that have such licensing agreements and they are totally cool if you say you are going to nofollow those links. Good thing I don't work for Google.

Here is how Danny ended it:

Again, I've been tracking how Google answers these questions for 15 years or so. How GoogleGuy would have responded versus Matt Cutts (who was GoogleGuy) versus John Mueller or Gary Illyes and now Danny Sullivan. Let me give you my best guesses at their responses from all of them:

GoogleGuy : We didn't have a nofollow attribute when I was around, so do what you want. :)

Matt Cutts: I'd suggest they nofollow the links but if it is done in moderation, I doubt we would take action. But to be safe, nofollow those links.

John Mueller: Those links should be nofollowed and the licensing agreement should not require followed links.

Gary Illyes: We don't use links in our algorithm, instead we use DA (sarcasm)

Danny Sullivan: Well, see above - no need to speculate.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

 

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