Google published its first podcast named Search Off the Record and in that podcast, Gary Illyes from Google talked a bit more about all the nofollow link changes coming. He said again that he is working on something but it seems like these changes won't be a huge deal but again, this is currently a policy change but nothing is yet live with it.
In short, Google said in September they can use it as a hint for ranking and in March as a hint for crawling and indexing.
So what did he say? He said he is not sure if anything that he is working on will actually go live, but he is at the stage where the ranking leads are somewhat involved.
The hints he dropped around what might change include:
- Sites that post "visit our new site" and the links to the new site are nofollowed - might be counted some how and some way for crawling and indexing and ranking?
- The change is also helpful in discovering malicious sites and spammy sites.
He is working on three different projects around the nofollow link policy change and they may go live or may not go live.
If they do go live, it will be announced, so you will know about it.
Ultimately, Google said there is nothing to optimize for here, nothing you need to change on your end. This is about Google doing things on their end.
He talks about this at the beginning of the podcast. Here is the podcast audio embed:
Forum discussion at Twitter.
