From March 1st nofollow will be suggestion for ranking on Google

News admin 28 February 2020 Reading time : 3 minutes

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Back in September 2019, Google surprised the entire SEO world by announcing major changes in the way publishers can mark outbounding links from their own web pages. As you surely remember, the search engine added two new rels – UGC and sponsored – and changed the interpretation of the nofollow rel, which is perhaps the most relevant aspect of this revolution. From March 1st, the change will be officially effective and Google will use nofollow as a suggestion from the ranking point of view as well.

Rel attribute to qualify outbounding links to Google

The focus is on the rel attribute in the <a> tag, which allows us to communicate to the spider additional information about outbounding links by establishing a relationship between the pages. Since last September we have three specific values to use to report to Google the relationship of our site with the linked page:

rel=”sponsored“, for paid links
rel=”ugc“, for user-generated contents
rel=”nofollow“

What the new rels mean

With these changes Google makes us understand that – despite the evolution of the algorithm and the refinement of search criteria – still today it is unable to figure out with certainty which are the natural links to consider for the ranking. Basically, now the search engine asks users and sites to “self-report” the nature of external links to simplify the decoding of backlinks, confirming – between the lines – how link building and links are fundamental as ranking factors.

How to interpret the sponsored rel for outbounding links

Specifically, the sponsored rel marks the links that constitute payed advertisements or placements and, from what you can perceive, in the presence of such a marked link Google will not even remotely pass PageRank to the linked site.

To encourage its spreading, Google had announced to publishers that pages with commercial links without the correct rel could be penalized; a sort of “terrorist leverage” that rather appears as a way to entice websites to use the sponsored rel so to allow Google to re-evaluate even previous cases and, possibly, remove the value assigned in the past and by mistake to linked sites.

The new UGC rel

It is instead specifically intended for comments, forum posts and sites with free contributors the UGC – User generated Content – rel which identifies links from web pages where content was written by users and not by the owner.

Reporting this attribute helps Google to clearly understand when a link may be resulting from spam activity, so 100% not a natural link.

Dissociating from linked site with the nofollow

In the end, we would like to focus on the rel=“nofollow”, an attribute introduced back in 2005 as a means to fight spam (especially in the comments) and used to tell the spider not to follow the web page linked, so presumably, without transferring any link juice.

Since September 10th, 2019, as said, Google has announced that it will reserve itself the possibility to decide whether to consider or not the nofollow, downgrading it then to a simple suggestion: such change becomes official from March 1st, that is in less than two days!

What is going to change with the new nofollow

By interpreting the attribute in a different way, Google will have the chance to use the links as signals to improve the functioning of its own ranking systems. As a result, links with the rel=”nofollow” attribute will no longer be completely ignored in SEO terms (and we have long known that the crawler still follows the nofollow links for scanning) but they will now add to the complex system of learning and reconsidering of links that helps determine the classification of a site.

From Google are also coming direct directions for sites regarding the use of rels, and in particular they recommend to use “the nofollow value when other values are unsuitable and you prefer that Google would not associate your site with the linked page or that it would not scan that page from your site”.

Although links marked with rel attributes are generally not followed, we all need to remember that linked pages could be detected by other means, such as sitemap or links from other sites, and thus still be scanned. Therefore, the use of nofollow on links (also internal ones) does not completely avoid scanning and indexing, and to prevent Google from following a link that refers to a page of our site you have to use the Disallow rule of the robots.txt file, or use the noindex meta tag robots to prevent Google from indexing a page.