Google made the big announcement late at night on Tuesday, 10th September. Nofollow links will now be treated as hints for ranking purposes. The news is big and sure to have many ripple effects. You must have a lot of questions regarding the same . Here is all you need to know about the change.
Nofollow link attribute was launched in the year 2005. It was launched to prevent spamming in comments. Up until now, the Nofollow link attribute was ignored. Google did not consider it for crawling, indexing, or ranking. Starting yesterday, the Nofollow attribute will be considered as a ‘hint’ for Google and will carry some SEO weight.
Before yesterday, you used to use the attribute “nofollow” for all paid, sponsored, and UGC content. From now-
- “Sponsored” will be used for paid and sponsored links.
- “Ugc” for comments or other user-generated content.
- “Nofollow” for all untrusted links.
You don’t need to disavow any existing nofollow links. Here is what John Mueller has to say about it
WordPress is likely to adopt the new link attributes in the next release. Joost De Valk posted the same on Twitter.
