Here’s what you need to be aware of as Google begins to treat nofollow links as a hint for crawling and indexing.
By the way, very handy, check out this tip to open a cached page on Google: https://www.blog-du-net.net/comment-ouvrir-les-pages-en-cache-de-google/.
Further reading : Google Home or Amazon Alexa?
Starting Sunday, March 1, Google will treat the nofollow link attribute as a hint rather than a directive for crawling and indexing purposes. Google already treats all link attributes (sponsored, UGC, and nofollow) as signals for ranking purposes, and has been doing so since the initial announcement in September.
Introduced for the first time in 2005, the nofollow link attribute was created to prevent spam links from passing credit and manipulating ranking signals. Check out our nofollow explainer to catch up on everything you need to know about the original nofollow attribute. Source: Le Blog du Net.
See also : Interpretation of Atypical Behaviors in Domestic Cats
Definition of link attributes. Last year, Google introduced new link attributes for sponsored content and user-generated content (UGC).
- rel=”sponsored”: This attribute can be used to identify links on your site that are part of an advertisement, sponsorship, or other paid arrangement.
- rel=”ugc”: This attribute is recommended for links appearing in user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
- rel=”nofollow”: This attribute can be applied to any scenario where you want to link to a page but do not want to pass ranking credit to it.
Why Google introduced these new attributes. Gary Illyes and Danny Sullivan from Google, co-authors of the September announcement, stated that the new attributes help Google better understand the web and allow site owners to classify the nature of their links if they wish.
But it’s essential: implementing the attributes does not affect your site and is entirely voluntary.
What you should do. “If you were using nofollow to block sensitive areas of your site that you didn’t want crawled, it probably makes sense to go block them in a different way,” said Patrick Stox, technical SEO and brand ambassador at Ahrefs. There are different methods, such as robots.txt or meta tags, that you can use to regulate how Google crawls and indexes pages.
Regarding UGC and sponsored attributes, their implementation is voluntary. If you want to provide this information to Google (and have links classified for your own reference), feel free to do so. Whether you do it or not will not impact your site.