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Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that the nofollow link attribute has been and still is working fairly well. He added hasn't "seen many cases of sites causing themselves significant issues, or of pages not getting credit in quite some time."
Here is the tweet:
In talking with various folks internally, my feeling is that overall this has been, and still is, working fairly well. I haven't seen many cases of sites causing themselves significant issues, or of pages not getting "credit" in quite some time.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 23, 2019
This comes after a rant from Lyndon:
I like the fact that NF permits us the ability to reference pages/sites and not pass value (because they suck, there's examples of bad things etc.).
— Lyndon NA (Darth Autocrat) (@darth_na) April 23, 2019
It has it's uses.
And yes, I'm sure it had some influence of spammy link campaigns due to sites not providing value etc.
... you tell us.
— Lyndon NA (Darth Autocrat) (@darth_na) April 23, 2019
Did it work?
Did it impact link spam?
Did it improve the link graph?
vs
How many sites hurt themselves misusing it?
How many sites/pages don't get credit that should?
And then John says SEOs basically want it to work both ways:
I think what you're saying is you both want Google to stop using links as a ranking factor, and also use nofollow links as a ranking factor, which is a bit confusing.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) April 23, 2019
It is hard to make everyone happy - but interesting that Google says the nofollow is working well and they are happy with it.
Personally, I do kind of agree - if Google can handle links on their own and the purpose behind the nofollow is to give SEOs a tool that make them feel good, then why bother?
Forum discussion at Twitter.
