Big Changes to NoFollow & Born of 2 New Link Attributes

Google is making some big changes to Nofollow link attribute & also has announced of introducing two new link attributes.

Don’t get scared, it’s common with Google to bring new changes to the system and its how Google improve it’s search engine experience for its users and keeps SEO professionals busy adopting new changes and puts into trouble to the black hat users.

So what’s in the bucket?

Changes to nofollow attribute:

Before that, Google had introduced nofollow attributes in 2005 to stop blog comment spam for the site owner by “ignoring”the given link. And now it has made a decision of using nofollow attribute as a “Hint”. Then it will take actions accordingly.

rel=”nofollow”

meaning: Just to ignore the link and not pass link juice (Page Rank Points)

Here is the update for nofollow lovers: Google is not going to ignore your links now on-wards but will look into it and take actions accordingly.

Born of new link attributes:

Along with the change to existing nofollow attribute’s behavior, Google has introduced two new attributes just to make links easier to evaluate & decide the impact on SEO.

Here are the two new link attributes:

rel=”ugc”

ugc stands for User Generated Content and will be used in forum discussions, comments etc.

rel=”sponsored”

Sponsored attribute will be used to identify ad intent content like sponsored content or advertisements etc.

Impact on SEO:

Google said, the changes wont impact rankings significantly but its learning how to use them in future to stop spamming and ad intent links and heavily affiliated links.

Conclusion:

Of course, Its a big change to the attribute in past 15 years. But nothing to worry about and need to wait the time till Google starts implementing in ranking.