Google shook up the SEO world by announcing big changes to how publishers should mark nofollow links. The changes — while beneficial to help Google understand the web — nonetheless caused confusion and raised a number of questions. We've got the answers to many of your questions here. 14 years after its introduction, Google today announced significant changes to how they treat the "nofollow" link attribute. The big points: Link attribution can be done in three ways: "nofollow", "sponsored", and "ugc" — each signifying a different meaning. (The fourth way, default, means no value attributed) For ranking purposes , Google now treats each of the nofollow attributes as " hints " — meaning they likely won't impact ranking, but Google may choose to ignore the directive and use nofollow links for rankings. Google continues to ignore nofollow links for crawling and indexing purposes , but this strict behavior changes March 1, 2020, at...