Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links | Hacker News Reader

Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links

webmasters.googleblog.com

73 pointsredm19 comments

" “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.

What you are saying is the same.

It's mainly for comments, as you want to decrease the reason for spambots to create links.

Your presumption is the correct way to use nofollow. If you have actual sensitive information it should be locked behind some sort of authentication.

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

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.

'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'.

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.

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.

> 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...

It seems like you might have a valid complaint. But the second half of your comment undercuts your credibility. Likening the editors to a cult and then calling them “not left wing” seem like dogwhistles. Like you’re trying to color the space around them without actually making specific claims.

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?

Here's the actual announcement: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-...

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

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

OK, changed to that from https://searchengineland.com/googles-new-treatment-of-nofoll.... Thanks!

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...

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

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.

If you're writing nofollow links to try and influence what pages on your site are or are not prominently displayed in search results, you're doing it wrong.

Nofollow links were stated as "My link to this page should not benefit that page's rank", but apparently some people found a loophole: "I can exclude pages from Google's index of my site by nofollow'ing all links to them".

Loophole closed.

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