Google Changed Nofollow Link Rule To Better Understand The Web

Oct 14, 2019 - 7:21 am 0 by

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The reason Google changed the nofollow link from a directive to a hint is to give the search engine more flexibility to understand the web. Prior, Google was unable to look at those links at all, it was a directive. Now that it is a hint, Google can use those links if they see fit. At least now with it being a hint, they can see if it is missing out or not in terms of if the search results can be more relevant if they ignore nofollows on some sites.

Those new link attributes are to help Google but the change to the nofollow link attribute specifically might not just help Google, it might help you as well. For example, if you have a lot of links from CNN and those are all nofollowed and Google decides to maybe count them now, you can win. I am not saying that Google will do that, but they might or can...

Here are the tweets where Gary talked about this at PubCon:

When I asked about "half of the web", it was not literally half of the web:

Also, will Google decide to use nofollowed links? That is an option but it is up to the ranking team now to decide:

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Note: This story was pre-written before the Sukkot holiday. I am currently offline for the holiday and unable to respond to comments on this site, social, media or other platforms.

 

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