Google will be treating nofollow links differently

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Google announced that it will not be treating the rel="nofollow" attribute as a signal any more, but as a hint. The background is that so many CMS’es are designating every link as nofollow.

They’re introducing two new hints: ugc for user generated content and sponsored for paid links.
For the UGC, they’re explicitly mentioning forums.

My opinion is that this is a big step forward, since the vast use of nofollow was killing the idea behind PageRank.

Full announcement here: Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links

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Changing the code to use “nofollow ugc” seems like a fairly straightforward and safe thing for Discourse to do.

The above is my personal opinion and not necessarily that of Google, LLC

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It it valid to use both? Should it just be “ugc” now? I am unclear.

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From that blog’s FAQ:

Can I use more than one rel value on a link?
Yes, you can use more than one rel value on a link. For example, rel=“ugc sponsored” is a perfectly valid attribute which hints that the link came from user-generated content and is sponsored. It’s also valid to use nofollow with the new attributes – such as rel=“nofollow ugc” – if you wish to be backwards-compatible with services that don’t support the new attributes.

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What “services” support nofollow other than Google?

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Baidu, Yandex supports nofollow

Bing, as a hint

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Can you assign this @eviltrout? I assume it is a very very simple change, almost a copyedit?

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Hey @Roman_Rizzi this is probably an easy one, please take a look!

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We’re now using nofollow ugc:

Latest Onebox version is using it too:

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On 2.6.0.beta2 I’m getting rel="nofollow noopener" with no ugc attribute for external links. Anyone else?

Edit: Looked for a recent link posted on meta. Seems that it’s also the case here: What is this line for in a Discourse forum's RSS feed?

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Not seeing the ugc attribute either, will take a look.

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Fixed here:

Links will correctly use nofollow ugc now.

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