This makes entire parts of the link graph less useful to Google. Do featured links from trusted Wikipedia contributors really not count? Perhaps Google could understand the web better if they changed the way they considered nofollow links.
By treating the nofollow attribute as a “hint,” they can better incorporate these signals into their algorithms.
Hopefully this will be a positive step for valuable content creators, as a wider link graph will be impacted by more potential rankings. Though it seems unlikely that this will change much for most sites.
Prior to this, SEO professionals generally believed that nofollow kazakhstan mobile database links worked like this:
Not used for crawling and indexing Google doesn’t pay attention to them.
As Google has confirmed , it is not used for ranking . For years, many SEOs have believed this was not the case.
To be fair, there has been a lot of debate and speculation about the second statement, and Google has not been forthcoming on the subject. Experimental data and anecdotal evidence suggest that Google has long considered nofollow links to be a potential ranking signal.
As of today, Google’s guidelines state that new link attributes — including sponsored and ugc — are handled like this:
Still not used for crawling and indexing see what is changing below
For ranking purposes , all nofollow directives are now officially “hints” — meaning Google can choose to ignore it and use it for ranking purposes. Many SEOs believe that this is how Google has treated nofollow for some time.
Starting March 1, 2020, these link attributes will be treated as full hints, which means.