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“If you were using nofollow to block any sensitive areas of your site that you didn’t want crawled, it probably makes sense to go block these in a different way,” said Patrick Stox
"<p>Was this actually a thing people did?
I presumed nofollow was just for linking to external sites that you didn't want to boost their search engine ranking.
'If you want to provide Google with that information (and have links classified for your own reference), feel free to do so. Whether you do or don’t won’t impact your site.'<p>My cynical guess is that few people will bother to make the distinction and soon enough '...won't impact your site' will become '.. a slight boost if you do'.
What is the correct way to hide an external link from Google's bots?<p>i.e. I have lots of links to a particular e-commerce site, but I'd rather Google didn't know about it so my site doesn't get a ranking penalty.<p>Currently I have links to a certain directory on my site, and that entire directory is "Disallow" in the robots.txt. When the index.php in that directory loads it 302 re-directs to the e-commerce site in question.
This is the logical conclusion of the overuse of „nofollow“. As but one example, the German Wikipedia has for years nofollow‘ed external links. That’s a policy that reduces their work load because it discourages spammers. But it also denies the public to profit from all the information that these links convey.<p>Incidentally, English Wikipedia doesn’t use nofollow as far as I remember, showing it’s entirely possible to police edits adding links. (My impression is the German WP Community has a certain ideological bend where they consider links to commercial sites ineligible even if those represent best possible sources of information. It’s not exactly „left-wing“, but closer to the weird mindset that afflicts members of a club when they spend too much time with each other and isolated from he outside).<p>Anyway, Google is really doing us a favor here. There‘s information in those links and willingly disregarding it was hurting their users, i. e. everyone. Detecting spam has also improved quite a bit, so the downside for websites should have lessened somewhat.
I don't get it. The new attributes make sense, but why phase-out nofollow? There's nothing wrong with it, why can't Google just leave it the way that it is?
Here's the actual announcement:
<a href="https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-new-ways-to-identify.html" rel="nofollow">https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving-nofollow-...</a>
Urgh! They already ignore robots.txt.<p>This is because we need to write some weird sh!t on all our pages. Now they tell us it doesn't even matter if we do...