On September 11, 2019, Google announced updates to its Nofollow link attribute. This update allows greater flexibility for webmasters to categorise their Nofollow links into UGC (user Generated Content) , Sponsored and the a catch-all Nofollow attribute for dodgy untrusted links. Sounds confusing? Let me explain by an example:
Phase 1: January 2005, Launch of the Nofollow link attribute
Google launched the Nofollow link attribute link spam. Later it was expanded to be used on any links that webmasters wanted Google to ignore. Eventually Google mandated that all paid or sponsored that affected search results be marked as nofollow. This clubbed together several types of links into one single Nofollow bucket , ranging from spammy links to user generated content like reviews. Google completely ignored any content marked as nofollow. It was not used for indexing or crawling or influencing the search results.
Phase 2: September 2019, Splitting of the Nofollow link attribute
Google finally decided to address the issue of clubbing together of several types of links into one single Nofollow bucket by allowing webmasters to classify content into :
- User Generated Content: Webmasters will now have to use rel=”ugc” for their user generated content links
- Sponsored/Paid Content : Webmasters will now have to use rel=”sponsored” for their paid content links
- Catch-All Nofollow for untrustworthy links (spammy links) : Webmasters can also use rel=”nofollow” for spam untrustworthy links
For old links, google has not mandated this change and there is no penalty for not making the change. Also, there is no incentive yet to make this change but going by how changes are from google this might become important later on. So my advice is to make this change.
Another important point is that the new attributes can be paired together , for example rel= “nofollow sponsored”
Finally a few important things to keep in mind , This change is not mandatory and will not affect rankings (yet). Google wants to get categorisation of links done through this change and one can only assume that this granularity could later impact importance of links when it comes to influencing search rankings.
Cyrus Shepard from Moz summarized it perfectly in the chart below.
Google Nofollow SEO Update