Reminder: Changes to NoFollow Go Live in March

Last October we told you that Google released two new link attributes to support Nofollow. You may recall that Google added, "additional ways to identify to Google Search the nature of particular links" as summarized below:

• rel="sponsored": Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
  
• rel="ugc": UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
  
• rel="nofollow": Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.

At the time Google said, "All the link attributes -- sponsored, UGC and nofollow -- are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within Search."

To muddy the water a bit their October 2019 announcement reiterated:

All the link attributes, sponsored, ugc and nofollow, now work today as hints for us to incorporate for ranking purposes. For crawling and indexing purposes, nofollow will become a hint as of March 2020.

Anyway, we're here! ...at the March 2020 deadline for the changed "crawling and indexing" of nofollow. So, consider yourself reminded!

As to actionable strategy, nothing has changed; we're sticking with what we suggested last October.

• Actionable Strategy — If you're currently using nofollow to block areas of your site from being crawled, which isn't something we'd ever recommend, then you need to block it in for real within your robots.txt file.

  Beyond that concern, feel free to read Google's October '19 announcement in its entirety so that you can get the news directly as Google released it. And then you ca...