Evolving NoFollow link | What Google’s update says about link building

15 years back, Google introduced nofollow link attribute to discourage comment spam. After many other updates in Google’s algorithm, webmasters started using rel=”nofollow” attribute while linking sponsored links in their web space. Since then getting sponsored links always means no-follow links, which means they don’t contain any value to the targeted page.

Google has announced a new update about no-follow links in which they have further enhanced the scope of no-follow link by adding User Generated Content (UGC) and Sponsored tags. These link attributes will help Google to identify the nature of the link generated in the content which will further help them to transfer the link juice to the targeted domain.

How webmasters are dealing with nofollow link?

It is quite simple today for the webmasters to deal with the sponsored content. They can help you earn either a do-follow link or a no-follow link to your website. This is the reason that you can easily find that publishers don’t mind even to have no-follow link from a good ranking domain.

You can easily find the fact about any domain to see how many links being built have no-follow link attribute and how many have do-follow link attribute. For the purpose you can check any online tool like Moz’s Link Explorer or Ubersuggest by Neil Patel or etc. Simply put any URL in the search console of your favorite tool to list all the backlink URLs. In the result you can see the count of total back links including no-follow links.

Other than that, whenever someone is asking for a guest post on a website, they ask for the do-follow links straight. If it is only to get a link from a descent website, no-follow links are also acceptable.

How Google screen a link?

Google is evolving it’s search algorithm day by day which is making Google a smart search engine. If you are publishing a guest post or a contributor’s post on any high end blog, Google will also consider the status of the author. If the author is a staff from that particular blog, the link from that particular post will be consider as webmaster’s generated link.

But if the post is published by a contributor the link from that post will be considered as a sponsored link. This is most likely possible that Google will be ignoring the links found on the post published by the contributors. This way Google will not shift any value to the targeted website hence no value will be counted for that particular post.

What Google wants from webmasters?

Google wants you to identify the mean of link building on your website. For the purpose they have introduced two new link attributes to make the links more clear to Google.

If someone is paying you for link building, Google wants you to mention it as a sponsored link. This will help the search engine to build their knowledge bank against all the link building for a website. So next time whenever you are going to help someone in link building through sponsored post use the following attribute:

Rel=”sponsored”

If you allow someone to publish some content at their own for the link building purpose, you as webmaster will specify all the particular links using the following link attribute:

Rel = “ugc”

If you are running a forum on your site, you need to automate your forum for all the links being generated by the users with the link attribute:

Rel=”ugc”

Futher to above, you can still use rel=”no-follow” where you think that you don’t want to let Google consider the link to be crawled.

You can also use more than one rel value in the link attribute. Google allows you to use no-follow with the newly created link attributes, for example;

Rel=”nofollow ugc”

Rel=”nofollow sponsored”

Rel=”ugc sponsored”

All are valid values for the rel attribute.

By Google, these changes will effect from March 1, 2020. It means you don’t need to get worried right away to make changes for the new updates. All the links generated previously assigned rel=”nofollow” no need to update according to the Google’s resent update.

The only purpose of this update is to let Google know either the link generated on the web page need to crawl or not. Further more, Google also like to know at the earliest stage either to crawl the link or not. And if it is required to crawl how much it should be valued for the targeted website.

How it can effect SEO?

This update is more to the identification of link generation. The secondary purpose is to decide either to transfer the link juice to the targeted website or not. Having this update, Google has increased the number of signals for the purpose of transfer of link juice.

The purpose of Google is clear as the search engine is looking to rank a website not on the basis of SEO but on the basis of either people love the website or not.

Final words

Don’t’ be afraid of this new update as to me it is more to create more and more amazing and attractive content which serve your prospects. The more content you have on your site there are high chances that your website will rank better than those who spend more time and energy on paid link building.

But again it doesn’t mean that it is end of paid link building. You can earn paid links as more do-follow links means more value transfer to the targeted website.