Unless you’ve been living under a considerably sized rock for the past two weeks (I won’t judge you too hard, we’ve all been there), the SEO community has been up in arms about Google’s recently announced changes to nofollow taking effect in March 2020, and yes, I too have jumped on the bandwagon:
Rel="feeling cute, might crawl later"
— Luke Carthy 🔎 (@MrLukeCarthy) September 10, 2019
As of March, nofollow will only be a hint
As of March 2020, rel=’nofollow’ will no longer be a directive like say, robots.txt – it will instead be considered a hint, like a canonical tag for example.
For most SEOs and sites, there’s little change, but…
For many folk and in the real world, this news is unlikely to make much or any difference at all to SEOs, but there are possibly some exceptions and industry verticals where links may need to be revised.
For example (and this isn’t an exhaustive list) but:
- Forums with user generated links
- Website’s comments sections
- Media sites featuring sponsored articles and news
This update appears to have raised more questions than answers
Now for me, and I’m sure it’s the same for many other SEOs in the community, this announcement raises more questions than it does answers. Mainly around how rel=’nofollow’ will no longer be considered a directive and will instead be perceived as a suggestion or hint.
- Does this mean nofollow links will now be crawled?
- How will incoming links with nofollow attribution impact our websites going forward?
- Wait, what about internal nofollow? Removing the directive here could be bad news for site structure and crawl efficiency
Well, although this post can’t answer all of the above questions, the good news is, we have been given an answer and some much needed clarity with that last question.
Internal nofollow will remain largely unaffected
Over on Search Engine Journal, John Mueller was asked a handful of questions about the soon-to-launch rel=’nofollow’ attribute and there’s one question that really piqued my interest; how the update will handle internal nofollow.
There aren’t many sites that leverage internal nofollow to more than those with faceted nav.
Nofollow can often be used on sites with faceted navs to manage crawl quota, improve crawl efficiency, reduce/remove keyword cannibalisation, prevent URL bloat etc – so it’s no surprise that this news could be unnerving for eCommerce SEOs like myself.
The good news is, it appears the benefits of using internal nofollow should remain largely unaffected.
John’s response:
“It’s not 100% defined but the plan is to make it so that you don’t have to make any changes, so that we will continue to use these internal nofollow links as a sign that you’re telling us they don’t need to be used for ranking, for indexing.”
John Mueller affirms that they will use nofollow on internal links but states that it is not a directive.
In summary…
As always with provisional updates like this, it’s nearly impossible to know exactly just how much of an impact this change will have on a global scale.
The good news at least is the use of rel=’nofollow’ on internal links should still remain a solid way to shape IA, deter search engines from crawling pages that are considered not important and manage crawl efficiency. Phew!
Comments are closed.