Google: new attributes for “nofollow”

Google introduces two new attributes for nofollow: sponsored, for affiliates, and ugc, for user generated content.

Google announces news for the nofollow, one of the attributes for the most widely used links especially at SEO level. This command, in fact, suggests to search engines not to follow a hyperlink within a page, thus avoiding indexing. It is a useful resource, for example, when you want to insert a link to a resource not directly related to your website and, for this reason, detematizing. To make the functionalities of nofollow even more precise, Big G has decided to introduce two new attributes: sponsored and ugc. What are they for and, above all, how are they used?

New attributes

As announced, Google has decided to add new attributes to the classic nofollow, designed to make crawler activity even more precise. The two new commands include:

• • sponsored: useful for those links inserted as part of a sponsorship, an agreement between companies or other types of partnership;
  • ucg: ideal for identifying all those links to user-generated content, or content created directly by users, including chats and forums.

The use is very simple and follows the rules already defined for the same nofollow: if, for example, you want to introduce the attribute sponsored, its code will be:

• • rel=”nofollow sponsored

Google has stressed that the introduction of new attributes is essential to better understand the origin of links and avoid possible penalties for unnatural links, thus allowing site owners to indicate precisely to search engines which links should not be considered as first parties.

Implementation

The new attributes can be implemented immediately, as they are already active on the Big G search engine. The company explained that it is not necessary to modify the already published links, since the newborn attributes currently function as simple suggestions for crawler, but they do not have the ability to determine extreme consequences on indexing. So much so that, as already announced in the past, from March 2020 also the same nofollow will be considered a simple suggestion, leaving it to the search engine algorithms to determine if a link is possibly thematic and why.

As for sponsored, in particular, Big G has recommended to insert it only when actually useful, because if used incorrectly it could weaken thematic links. It should therefore not be chosen as a substitute for the normal reporting techniques of ads, but only for affiliations, links to sites of third-party companies with which you have initiated a collaboration fee, and so on.

Pubblicato il 22 November 2019