Google Crawl and Indexing Update – March 1, 2020 Nofollow Update

by Guna Nadar - 8/17/2020 1331 Views

March 1, 2020 update handle no-follow links as a hint for crawling and indexing. Use more robust ways to protect your pages from being indexing.

Nofollow attributes were introduced nearly 15 years ago to help fight comment spam. However, it soon became one of Google’s favourite methods for flagging sponsored links. Later in 2019, Google announced a two-part update to how it treats nofollows. Now, Starting from March 1, 2020, Google begins handling no-follow links as a hint for crawling and indexing.

What is March 1, 2020 Nofollow Update?

Before now, Google treated no-follow links as directives. The search engine bot obeyed with no-follow link attribute without crawling or indexing them. But, starting from March 1, 2020, Google begins handling no-follow links as a hint for crawling and indexing.

“For crawling and indexing purposes, nofollow will become a hint as of March 1, 2020.” - Google

Review Your Nofollow Policy

Few marketers used no-follow to keep pages from being crawled. Typical pages linked with a no-follow could be links to user profiles, links to login pages and links to sections of a website that could be construed as thin pages. Utilizing Nofollow for blocking Google from crawling and indexing web pages was never a good practice. Instead, there are vigorous approaches like meta robots noindex directive to keep the page blocked.

Impact of March 1, 2020 Update

It is hard to forecast how Google Nofollow update is going to affect the business website online ranking. It might rely upon what pages Google decides to index and crawl. May be Google makes protocols on which page to index and which to abjure. It’s not implausible that Google will decide not to index low-quality pages.

Key Facts To Consider

Remain cognizant about the Nofollow Update

Be attentive that this new nofollow change was implemented from March first, 2020 onwards. If your business online ranking traffic begins changing, then it is worth investigating more about this update.

Review the use of Nofollow

Poor deployment of nofollow may prompt unintended results. It might be useful to review how your website pages are using Nofollows and instead pick meta robots noindex.

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Google

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Google Update

About Guna Nadar

Brief Info about Guna Nadar +

I mostly write technical aspects and not much into creative writing. For the past decade I worked along with top notch SEO & Internet Marketing professionals which naturally lured me into the world of Search Engines. When I am not writing I read from comics to philosophy.Antiques, Fishing, hunting are my passions. Currently I am working on Google Penalty protection and .... more info about the author