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We know that Google made a change to the nofollow link policy, that starting on March 1, 2020, Google can look at a nofollow link attribute as a hint and not as a directive. Just to be clear, Google said in September they can use it as a hint for ranking and in March as a hint for crawling and indexing. But since then, it seems Google did not make any real change to search since the change - but a change is indeed coming.
I asked Gary Illyes of Google for an update on this nofollow hint policy change. I asked him "has Google done anything with this in terms of ranking, spam, etc?" Gary responded saying "you will have something. At one point. Some time in the future. No timeframe."
He doesn't believe anything was launched yet but what he is working on will indeed need to be announced. So it sounds big, big enough that it has to be announced by Google.
Here are those tweets:
We don't have anything to announce to the best of my knowledge. The thing I'm working on will need to be announced, so you will have something. At one point. Some time in the future. No timeframe.
— Gary 鯨理／경리 Illyes (@methode) May 19, 2020
Forum discussion at Twitter.
