Google’s nofollow link policy and its impact on web publishing
How a search giant’s nofollow link policy might impact web publishing and search engine optimization
Let’s get right to the point: As of March 2020 nofollow links will be used as hints for Google to discover and rate content. This is a major change that will likely impact the world of web publishing and SEO.
After 15 years, Google decided to change the way they handle nofollow links. The links were originally intended to signal to Google that links were spammy or paid. Now they will be viewed as hints. In other words: instead of disregarding the links completely they can now be viewed as relevant.
Is that all? No, adding to the change: the search giant introduced two new link relationship attributes: rel=sponsored and rel=ugc.
This will change the way we do web publishing and search engine optimization. In other words, the flap of Google’s wings will resonate throughout the internet, possibly resulting in large differences. This is how Google’s policy could influence web-publishing.
The flap of a butterflies wings
On September 10, 2019, Google released the following statement on its webmaster blog: (1)
Nearly 15 years ago, the nofollow attribute was introduced as a means to help fight comment spam. It also quickly became one of Google’s recommended methods for flagging advertising-related or sponsored links. The web has evolved since nofollow was introduced in 2005 and it’s time for nofollow to evolve as well.
In chaos theory, the butterfly effect is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. (2)
Content confusion
Let’s start with an obvious one. Every website serious about the topic of search engine optimization states something similar to this about nofollow links:
These [nofollow] links do not influence the search engine rankings of the destination URL because Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across them. In fact, Google doesn’t even crawl nofollowed links. (3)
The best websites are likely to change this very soon, but there will also be many websites lagging-behind. For a while, this will cause confusion among SEO specialists, content writers, and publishers.
How to deal with it:
Should SEO specialist freak out about this one? Probably not if you follow the canonical sources regarding this issue: Google is the source.
Links incoming
Because Google changed the way it views nofollow links (now regarding these as hints) the value of incoming links will also change. Let’s assume that 40% of the links pointing towards your website are nofollow. After March 1st this 40% of links will now pass link equity, in the form of a hint. It’s likely that this will impact your rankings.
But there’s a caveat. Every website has nofollow links in different ratios. If you and your competitor both had 1000 links, and you had 40% nofollow links and your competitor has 80% nofollow links, there’s a real chance of your competitor getting the bigger advantage with this change. Just like the flaps of a butterflies wings, this small change could result in big ranking shifts.
How to deal with it:
I recommend taking a good look at the link profile of your competitors to predict, with some probability, the likelihood of a major ranking shift. Tools like, Ahrefs, MOZ, Semrush, Searchmetrics and Majestic could help you predict the impact of this all.
Internal inflation
Let’s dig a little deeper into this matter. Many websites rely on hiding content by using internal nofollow links. Links that a visitor may visit, but a crawler is not allowed to. An example of such a page would be a login area. Google will no longer ignore these pages and they might end up in the index. In some cases, it might even swallow a large chunk of your crawl budget.
How to deal with it:
To prevent pages from ending up in the index and to maintain a valuable internal link structure you have to resort to other techniques. Here are a few that Google recommends: (4)
- robots.txt files
- meta tags
- password-protection of web server files
Spam the system
I’m sure Google didn’t rush into things, but one thing that remains to be seen is how this change will influence spamming behavior. Nofollow links on high authority websites like Wikipedia suddenly became a lot more attractive. They now have real value and might be targeted by spammers.
Of course, many software engineers have implemented checks and systems to prevent spamming behavior on user-generated content. But with higher rewards, spammers will get creative and look into new ways of shady link building techniques.
Advertisement anxiety
One of the ways to generate links is via a network of influencers. In a business exchange, an influencer will post a message on social media or write an article on its website. A website containing a lot of sponsored content may choose to implement the new rel=”sponsored” attribute. I have my doubts about this practice.
First of all, there’s no real incentive for a website owner to change the link, but even if they do, it might have negative side effects:
Influencer X vs Influencer Y
Let’s compare two types of influencers. Influencer X uses rel=”nofollow” and influencer Y uses rel=”sponsored”.
- When you invest in sponsored content by Influencer X, besides the traffic and exposure, you will also receive a link that Google uses as a hint, resulting in a better link profile and possibly higher rankings.
- Influencer Y only sends you traffic and exposure. There’s no advantage to the link. It may even be a disadvantage. Could a high number of incoming sponsored links result in a lower ranking? I’m not sure how Google will use the newly added attributes.
A link from Influencer X is deemed more valuable than a link from influencer Y and may also be safer.
And influencer Y faces another potential problem. Could a website with an abundance of outgoing sponsored links be devalued? I’m not sure, although Google could use these signals to determine what type of content you are publishing.
How to deal with it:
I recommend not to change your link attributes for now. Because currently there’s no incentive for you to do so.
It is still unclear to me, what the second-order effects of Google's nofollow policy will be. Only time will tell. A storm could be brewing or it might turn out to be nothing more than a butterfly flapping its wings.
Let’s just hope for the best, prepare for the worst!
What I would do?
As a web publisher, I would stick to the nofollow links for now. There’s no real incentive to change it anyways. From the perspective of an SEO specialist, I would compare your link profile to those of your competitors. The following tools could help you to assemble crucial information about your link profile:
- Google Search Console: Free link information gathered by Google
- Majestic: Low-cost link analysis.
- Ahrefs: The world’s largest backlink index.
- MOZ: Easily check your competitor’s backlinks.
- Semrush: Another has-it-all SEO tool.
- Searchmetrics: Analyze and rate the quality of backlinks.
Want more? Read my previous post: The fundamentals of SEO and software development
