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:
Nofollow made pretty much half the web invisible to Google. The changes to nofollow are so they can analyze sections of the web to determine how they are linking. @methode #Pubcon
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 8, 2019
Google was in a situation where they were unable to see half of the web because of blanket nofollow tags across many sites - this is why they decided to make nofollow a hint, not a directive. #pubcon @methode pic.twitter.com/yxfeWfZJSd
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 8, 2019
Links are important for understanding fringe information. Before if an authoritative site was linking to places Google couldn't follow those links.@methode #Pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 8, 2019
Nofollow is now a hint for ranking. It was originally created to fight comment spam. It evolved so that it was put on links that were paid, etc. But then sites applied blanket nofollows. It made Google blind to half of the web. @methode #Pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 8, 2019
When I asked about "half of the web", it was not literally half of the web:
It really sounded like an expression, not literal, no.
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 8, 2019
Also, will Google decide to use nofollowed links? That is an option but it is up to the ranking team now to decide:
"It is up to the ranking teams to decide how they want to use nofollows". In the past they were not allowed to use nofollow links. @methode @jenstar #Pubcon
— Marie Haynes (@Marie_Haynes) October 10, 2019
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.
