Let’s start with some background…
Most links on a page are what we call “dofollow”. When you link from one page to another you’re telling visitors and search engines that you are vouching for the value you expect they’ll receive once they click.
The ‘link equity’ or ‘link juice’ that flows through links is one of the main factors in determining where pages rank in Google. As they always do, spammers soon began to exploit this, often by spamming blog comments with links.
By adding rel=”nofollow” to a link’s html you’re telling search engine spiders, “Yes, I’ve linked to this site, but don’t give it any merit for SEO.”
For years it’s been good practice to nofollow any link that you didn’t want to pass SEO juice too. Now Google has introduced two new link attributes, ugc and sponsored. They are similar to nofollow but you can differentiate what the link is for. UGC is short for User Generated Content and Sponsored meaning a paid advertisement.
Beginning today, the nofollow attribute will be treated as a hint for ranking. At Overflow, we’ve always treated nofollow links as good for relevance, but not necessarily boosting authority. Seems like Google is making it official.
Don’t panic about the need to change things. From Google’s post, nofollow can continue to be used for all the reasons you’ve used it in the past, and you can use the other attributes when you feel like it.
Let the testing begin to see how and if rankings are affected!
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