Google Does Support Nofollow On HTML Link Tag

Jun 18, 2020 - 7:11 am 3 by

Swing Google

Gary Illyes from Google, after multiple days of research, has confirmed that Google indeed supports the use of the nofollow link attribute on HTML link tags.

He said on Twitter this is supported in "the form of rel="alternate nofollow", and that will prevent Google from using the link from the href attribute. If you don't specify a nofollow, the URL from href will be extracted as a weightless outlink."

Gary added that Google has "many systems that can do URL extraction that may be used for discovery. For instance, Googlebot itself can do some minimal extraction, rendering can do advanced extraction, HTML parser can do extraction," he said this is why it took him several days to get an answer on this question.

Here are the tweets on this from Gary:

And yes, you can use the rel ugc and sponsored or both on these as well:

This all came about because Joost from Yoast wants to tell Google not to crawl the comment RSS feeds of WordPress sites.

So this might help him and his team come up with a mechanism to communicate to Google, not to follow links to these comment RSS feeds.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

Update: Bing said it depends:

 

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