Attributes “nofollow” and “dofollow”
In 2005, the rel=”nofollow” attribute was announced to help combat comment spam. By this is meant a category of spambots, or spammer posts that abused web forms to send or post unsolicited advertisements. Google treated links marked as “nofollow” by not tracking them and therefore not affecting PageRank.
The opposite of this attribute was rel=”dofollow”, which indicated that search engines gave it weight. Such a link was part of the site’s linkbuilding strategy. If the page you linked to with the dofollow attribute had a high PageRank, your site benefited in its ranking.
New Rules
However, Google has changed this standard. It has introduced a new division of attributes that can be used to indicate the nature of specific links. The new feature is that you can use a combination of these attributes, such as rel=”nofollow ugc”.
- rel=”sponsored“: links marked this way mean either ads or paid promotions (commonly called “paid links”)
- rel=”ugc“: A user-generated link in content, (for social networks, blogs, websites, etc.) that is created by users of your products or services themselves. These are, for example, links in comments, or in posts on an online forum.
- rel=”nofollow“: all links that we do not want to be used to crawl, index, or pass ratings to the linked URL.
- No attribute: For ordinary links that we expect Google to crawl.
HTML
You can write a link on your page as follows:
<a href=”https://railsformers.com/blog” rel=”selected attribute”>Blog | Railsformers</a>
Do you have well labeled links on your page?
Here all three attributes are used for ranking purposes and there is no misuse of attributes. For crawling and indexing purposes, the attributes will begin to be used on March 1, 2020, according to Google. But beware! If you have untagged sponsored links on your site and want to avoid possible penalties in the future, use rel=”sponsored” or rel=”nofollow” to tag these links.
If your site uses mismatched attributes, don’t despair. We at Railsformers are able to help. As part of the optimization process, we’ll check your link labels for accuracy and apply new “rel” attributes so that you rank ahead of your competition on Google! Feel free to contact us for more information.