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Google recently has made a huge change in its algorithm on the aspect of the counting of No Follow Links. The changes have started to roll already as it is changing the ranking of many sites already. Earlier, the no-follow links were considered as a directive by Google. However, from now Google has started to decide whether any link can be used in the ranking purpose or not. Link building, On-Page SEO, Content Marketing and Link Spam will be hugely affected by this change.
What is Nofollow?
The Nofollow link means an HTML attribute will be added to the link to tell Google that the link cannot be trusted. This update was previously designed to tackle the problem of spamming in the blog commenting and launched in 2005. With time, it was used for the advertising links along with user-curated links that the site owner cannot trust.
What Google has said about Nofollow Link?
Check out the official announcement of the Google:
“When nofollow was introduced, Google would not count any link marked this way as a signal to use within our search algorithms. This has now changed.
All the link attributes — sponsored, UGC and nofollow — are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search.
We’ll use these hints — along with other signals — as a way to better understand how to appropriately analyze and use links within our systems.”
How will Google Will React?
Instead of ignoring, Google has said that it will start to consider hints about the ways to treat the links. The aim of this change is to collect data on those individual links along with the words of the anchor text and evaluate links for better identification of the link schemes attributing the signals.
“Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe content they point at,” Google expressed in the official statement. “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.”
How It Will Affect The Search Result?
As per Google, it will not have any significant changes in the search result. Moreover, they will use the collected data in the search ranking system and this hint system will give more flexibility to Google depending on its treatment of the links.
What you can expect?
You don’t need to change your nofollow links for now, according to the official statement of the search engine giant. You are allowed to leave the nofollow attributes to the sponsored or UGC links. “There’s absolutely no need to change any nofollow links that you already have,” but Google also said, for sponsored content, it “recommend[s] switching over to rel=”sponsored” if or when it is convenient.”
To get the best result, you can use the combination in single link tag. For example, rel = ‘ugc sponsored’ or rel = ‘nofollow ugc’ can be used in a single tag. It will give a hint to the google that the first link is user-generated content whereas the second one is sponsored.
Do we expect more comment spam then? Google has assured that there will be no scope of comment spam here. In the official statement, Google stated; “Many sites that allow third parties to contribute to content already deter link spam in a variety of ways, including moderation tools that can be integrated into many blogging platforms and human review. The link attributes of “ugc” and “nofollow” will continue to be a further deterrent. In most cases, the move to a hint model won’t change the nature of how we treat such links. We’ll generally treat them as we did with nofollow before and not consider them for ranking purposes. We will still continue to carefully assess how to use links within Search, just as we always have and as we’ve had to do for situations where no attributions were provided.”
