SEO & link value · Knowledge
Is nofollow a command or just a hint?
For its first fourteen years nofollow was treated as a directive: marked links passed nothing, period. In September 2019 Google reclassified all three attributes (nofollow, ugc, sponsored) as hints – signals the search engine may weigh, not orders it must follow.
Since 1 March 2020 the hint model also covers crawling and indexing: a nofollow link no longer guarantees that the target stays uncrawled.
Why the change came – and what actually changes for site owners
Google's stated reason: by 2019 so much of the web carried blanket nofollow (entire news sites, all of Wikipedia's external links, most big platforms) that obeying it as a directive meant discarding a huge slice of the link graph – valuable data about what the web considers citable. Treating the attributes as hints lets the engine use the pattern information while still respecting the site owner's core message. The practical translation for site owners is reassuringly small. First, your obligations are unchanged: paid links must be marked, and marking UGC remains the sensible default – the hint status does not soften the guidelines, it only changes what the engine does downstream. Second, expectations should be recalibrated: nofollow is a wish, not a wall – if you need to keep a page out of the index, that is the job of noindex or access control, never of nofollow on links pointing to it (the crawl-budget question digs into that neighbourly myth). Third, nothing about the change makes site-wide hygiene less useful: the hint is still read, still respected in the overwhelming run of cases, and still the correct label for links you do not vouch for. In short: keep doing the right thing, stop expecting it to be a guarantee.
Key facts
- Sept 2019: nofollow, ugc and sponsored become hints for ranking purposes.
- 1 March 2020: the hint model extends to crawling and indexing.
- Reason: blanket nofollow had removed too much of the link graph from view.
- Duties unchanged: paid links must still be marked – the guideline did not soften.
- Keeping pages out of the index is noindex's job – never nofollow's.