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So the big nofollow link attribute change is coming March 1st, which is this Sunday. But it seems like we shouldn't really see anything happen on March 1st, at least based on how Gary Illyes and John Mueller of Google are both saying we shouldn't see any changes on March 1st.
Why?
Well, first what is suppose to change on March 1st? On March 1st, Google said the nofollow will become a hint as of March 1, 2020 for crawling and indexing purposes. Google said "Those depending on nofollow solely to block a page from being indexed (which was never recommended) should use one of the much more robust mechanisms listed on our Learn how to block URLs from Google help page."
Just to be clear, Google already can use nofollow links for ranking, if they want. Just not until this Sunday can they use it for crawling and indexing. But hey, most SEOs know that you cannot fully control crawling and indexing just using nofollow on links.
So I asked Google about this and this is the response I got when I asked what changes we can expect on March 1st:
@dannysullivan @JohnMu any idea how much change we will see with the March 1st change to nofollow now capable of being used for crawling and indexing?
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) February 28, 2020
The responses:
I haven't done anything yet for March 1, kinda busy with COVID as John said.
— Gary "鯨理／경리" Illyes (@methode) February 28, 2020
What does that mean Gary hasn't done anything? So I asked "does that mean we won’t see changes on March 1 or you haven’t dug into researching the impact?" Gary responded "Yes."
Yes
— Gary "鯨理／경리" Illyes (@methode) February 28, 2020
Then he added:
(more seriously, we have nothing to announce on that front. like really nothing. *nothing*)
— Gary "鯨理／경리" Illyes (@methode) February 28, 2020
John Mueller from Google also said that he wouldn't expect to see any "visible effect on most sites."
I wouldn't be surprised if it had no visible effect on most sites.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 28, 2020
Then Eric Enge, an SEO, responded asking a bit more:
Yes. And no, we don't just pick dates to announce things that are already live :).
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 28, 2020
In any event, it seems like we shouldn't expect much of a change, or any change at all to our rankings, crawling or indexing on or after March 1st just from this nofollow rule change.
And no, the changes we saw in February are unrelated to any nofollow changes:
The answer is no.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) February 28, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
