
Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links - redm
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify.html
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Jonnax
" “If you were using nofollow to block any sensitive areas of your site that
you didn’t want crawled, it probably makes sense to go block these in a
different way,” said Patrick Stox "

Was this actually a thing people did? I presumed nofollow was just for linking
to external sites that you didn't want to boost their search engine ranking.

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processing
Yes back in the day - SEO’s would “link sculpt” internal do follow links as an
on-site optimization technique. The idea being to give the do followed pages
all of the link juice to rank their key pages for sales/conversion etc

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bhartzer
Seos did it to help pass PageRank to the more important pages, sure. But it’s
also about not really allowing the bots to follow certain other pages like
links to tags pages or other pretty much useless pages on the site. I’ve also
seen people add nofollow on links to privacy policy and terms of service
pages.

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dazc
'If you want to provide Google with that information (and have links
classified for your own reference), feel free to do so. Whether you do or
don’t won’t impact your site.'

My cynical guess is that few people will bother to make the distinction and
soon enough '...won't impact your site' will become '.. a slight boost if you
do'.

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grecy
What is the correct way to hide an external link from Google's bots?

i.e. I have lots of links to a particular e-commerce site, but I'd rather
Google didn't know about it so my site doesn't get a ranking penalty.

Currently I have links to a certain directory on my site, and that entire
directory is "Disallow" in the robots.txt. When the index.php in that
directory loads it 302 re-directs to the e-commerce site in question.

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IAmEveryone
This is the logical conclusion of the overuse of „nofollow“. As but one
example, the German Wikipedia has for years nofollow‘ed external links. That’s
a policy that reduces their work load because it discourages spammers. But it
also denies the public to profit from all the information that these links
convey.

Incidentally, English Wikipedia doesn’t use nofollow as far as I remember,
showing it’s entirely possible to police edits adding links. (My impression is
the German WP Community has a certain ideological bend where they consider
links to commercial sites ineligible even if those represent best possible
sources of information. It’s not exactly „left-wing“, but closer to the weird
mindset that afflicts members of a club when they spend too much time with
each other and isolated from he outside).

Anyway, Google is really doing us a favor here. There‘s information in those
links and willingly disregarding it was hurting their users, i. e. everyone.
Detecting spam has also improved quite a bit, so the downside for websites
should have lessened somewhat.

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yorwba
> it’s entirely possible to police edits adding links.

Yes, but it requires people to notice the spam and remove it. My first
Wikipedia edit was removing link spam for an (ironically German) translation
service on an article about linguistics.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linguistic_recons...](https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Linguistic_reconstruction&diff=prev&oldid=852186083)

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notRobot
I don't get it. The new attributes make sense, but why phase-out nofollow?
There's nothing wrong with it, why can't Google just leave it the way that it
is?

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skybrian
Here's the actual announcement:
[https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-
nofollow-...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-
ways-to-identify.html)

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gowld
Mods should change the bad blog post link to this authoritative page link.

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floatingatoll
They did, but you can always email them with the footer Contact link (works
faster than a comment).

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nocturnial
Urgh! They already ignore robots.txt.

This is because we need to write some weird sh!t on all our pages. Now they
tell us it doesn't even matter if we do...

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dickeytk
nofollow is for external links, robots.txt is for pages on your own domain.
They don’t reference the same thing.

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bhartzer
Google will index pages disallowed in robots.txt.

If you want a page out of the index, you must allow crawling in robots.txt and
use noindex on the page.

It used to be that you could use robots.txt to stop indexing but google
changed the rules a whole back.

