As typical for Google, they have recently released news on new changes to the world of seo on their search engine. This time they announced it will affect the nofollow attribute within links, that means seo enthusiasts and professionals should take note. And obviously when news has come out regarding seo release, this gets everyone talking about what it means for their campaigns and previous work.

What’s mainly alarmed seo ghana professionals the most, is the introduction of rel=”sponsored” and rel=”ugc”. Reason being is it changes the nofollow attribute which has remained the same since its 15 year old introduction. So, instead of nofollow being a hint to bots to ignore it, it’s now going to be recognised as a ‘hint’ for ranking. This applies to the two new link attributes as already mentioned.

Google are bringing these changes to fruition to help link attributes evolve, which is why sponsored and user generated content are being introduced. So, to help provide more context for how it’ll apply to seo professionals, the following outlines how each will function.

With rel=”nofollow”, this will apply when an seo expert wants to link to page but doesn’t want any link credit passing through or be recognised for any endorsement. On the other hand, with rel=”sponsored” this helps to identify to Google when a link is used as part of advertisement and other similar agreements. And finally, with rel=”ugc” this should be used within forums and on comments from user generated content.

When the new link attribute changes come into force next March, Google will aim to use them for crawling and indexing purposes. As already said, the search engine will use them as a ‘hint’ to help their bots index the links appropriately. This makes a change from previous seo , as they used to just ignore nofollow links.

Google have revealed their reasons for implementing these changes, which are for the purpose to collect more accurate data. They have said each link contains valuable information which can help improve the overall search engine. The data links contain include anchor text and outlines of link schemes. Moreover, this will also help identify unnatural link patterns.

These changes won’t bring significant changes to the results of search engines, so seo professionals don’t necessarily have to worry. However, in the future, Google will start to make use of the data collected to see how links and their attributes can be treated within search results. So, for now, seo enthusiasts and  professionals don’t need to make any changes to nofollow links. Although if you’re aware of any sponsored content containing links, the new rel=”sponsored” attribute will need including when possible.

What’s more, seo experts can use more than one of the attributes within link tags. An example tag could look like rel=”ugc sponsored”, so this would tell bots it’s user generated content as well as sponsored content. It’s important to note that these changes shouldn’t bring comment spam, as most websites have their own deterrents for link spamming, like human moderators.

Thankfully, these nofollow changes Google are bringing to fruition, can be helpful for most agencies, so be sure to use them wisely!