UPDATED - WRONG: Google: Nofollow Hint Ranking Change Has Not Been Worked On Yet

Feb 7, 2020 - 7:47 am 3 by

Google Truck Do Not Follow

UPDATE: I spoke with people at Google and this is not the case. Ranking has gone live and they are not sure exactly what Gary was talking about. Here is also a post from Danny:

Maybe Gary was misquoted, maybe I misunderstood the quotes - whatever. This story is wrong.

Gary Illyes from Google said at PubCon yesterday that yes, Google may start to decide to use nofollow links for ranking/crawling/indexing but the work on that from the engineering team has not yet begun. Google originally said they would make this change after March 1, 2020 but I guess it might be delayed a bit?

Just to clarify, prior to September 2019, Google would not crawl or index or use for ranking purposes and link with a nofollow on it (they would index the page linked to if there are other ways for Google to get to the page. After September 2019, Google would still not use it for crawling or indexing, but may use it for a hint. After March 1st, Google would also potentially be able to use nofollow links not just for ranking purposes but also for crawling and indexing, if it wanted to.

Gary from Google supposedly said this (not sure if he is talking about crawling and indexing, ranking or both or something else) has not yet happened yet but they do want to start working on it in the future. Here are the tweets related to what Gary said.

So I am not sure if Google has yet to use nofollow links as all for ranking purposes yet or not. They can if they want to and in less than a month they can use it for crawling and indexing. But will they, are they? Seems like Gary said not yet.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: A bit more detail:

Update 2: Looking back, it seems like Gary said this change did go live when the announcement was posted back in September, so maybe he only meant crawling and indexing isn't live yet?

I do not know.

 

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