Google is making some big changes to the rel=”nofollow” tag on March 1st, 2020, the Nofollow links are nothing new. They’ve been around for 14 years and have been a widely debated subject when it comes to backlink strategies.
Wait.. First, what are Nofollow links?
Nofollowed links are hyperlinks with a rel=“nofollow” tag. These links do not influence the search engine rankings of the destination URL because Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across them. In comparison follow links do transfer page rank or “link juice”.
The markup for both are below
Followed:
<a href=”https://hirecorey.com”>Hire Corey</a>
Nofollowed:
<a href=”https://hirecorey.com” rel=”nofollow”>Hire Corey</a>
Its been speculated though that Nofollow links do pass on a tiny bit of “linkjuice” depending on the site an instance. A study by was done by AHREFs of 44,589 SERPs to see if there was any correlation between Google rankings and various backlink attributes—one of which was the number of followed backlinks.
So what’s changing?
Well a few things, first of all, they are evolving the Nofollow link but also adding two additional link attributes to account for paid content and user-generated content.
These two new attributes are as followed
rel=“sponsored”: Identifies links on a site that were created as part of advertising, sponsorships or similar agreements.
rel=“ugc”: Identifies links that appear within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
This is pretty exciting but they are still going to be classified similarly as Nofollow but the more exciting thing is this statement by Google.
“Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at. Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement.”
This is really cool because Google is finally saying that Nofollow links will be used as “Hints” which is finally validation that they are worth going after in our link building strategies. This is good news and confirms what some of us had suspected for years.
