Google updated the no-follow attribute on Tuesday 10th September 2019 regarding which they say it aims to help fight comment spam. The Nofollow attribute has remained unchanged for 15 years, but Google has had to make this change as the web evolves.
Google also announced two new link attributes to help website owners and webmasters clearly call out what type for link is being used,
rel=”sponsored”: Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
rel=”ugc”: UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
rel=”nofollow”: Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.
March 1st, 2020 changes
Up until the 1st of March 2020, all of the link attributes will serve as a hint for ranking purposes, anyone that was relying on the rel=nofollow to try and block a page from being indexed should look at using other methods to block pages from being crawled or indexed.
John Mueller mentioned the use of the rel=sponsered in one of the recent Google Hangouts.
Source: YouTube
The question he was asked
“Our website has a growing commerce strategy and some members of our team believe that affiliate links are detrimental to our website ranking for other terms do we need to nofollow all affiliate links? If we don’t will this hurt our organic traffic?”
John Mueller’s answer
“So this is something that, I think comes up every now and then, from our point of view affiliate links are links that are placed with a kind of commercial background there, in