2. @patrickstox
Product Advisor, Technical SEO, &
Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs
• I write for Ahrefs blog but have written for many industry publications
in the past
• I speak at some conferences like SMX, Pubcon, UnGagged, TechSEO
Boost
• Organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup (most successful in US) and
the Beer & SEO Meetup
• We also run a conference, the Raleigh SEO Conference
• Founder Technical SEO Slack Group (message me for an invite)
• Moderator /r/TechSEO on Reddit
Who is Patrick Stox?
11. @patrickstox
• Brad Fitzpatrick - LiveJournal
Dave Winer - Scripting News
Anil Dash - Six Apart
Steve Jenson - Blogger
Matt Mullenweg - WordPress
Stewart Butterfield - Flickr
Anthony Batt - Buzznet
David Czarnecki - blojsom
Rael Dornfest - Blosxom
Mike Torres - MSN Spaces
Platforms Helped Them
12. @patrickstox
• Ross Rader - Blogware
John Panzer - AOL Journals
Kevin Marks - of Technorati also added a draft formal spec for nofollow.
Reini Urban - PhpWiki
David Gorman - ModBlog
Arnab Nandi - Drupal
James Tauber - Leonardo
Jeremie Bouillon - points out a GPL plugin for Textpattern
Simon Brown - Pebble
Ilkka Huotari - Netdoc
Shaun Inman - ShortStat
Eaden McKee - bBlog
Yariv Habot - backBlog
John Lyons - enetation
Steven Roussey - Network54
Will Yardley - Dreambook
Samuel Klingen Daams - Travellerspoint
Even More Platforms Helped Them
25. @patrickstox
Links sellers, spam, and fear of penalties
pushed many sites to nofollow all links.
Many Sites Over-Reacted: Sitewide Nofollow
26. @patrickstox
I’m not going to name names, but this happened in
many niches and many countries.
There were lots of weird Penguin recovery
strategies too.
In Some Cases Nofollowing Outbound Links
Became A Recommended Strategy
32. @patrickstox
Google Now Penalizing Subdomains Leasing, Not
Just Subfolder Leasing
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalizing-
subdomains-leasing-28203.html
Subdomain Leasing
34. @patrickstox
Penguin no longer penalizes, it just ignores bad
links
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/09/penguin-is-now-part-of-our-core.html
They were already ignoring signals from many
links like affiliate links which they recommended
people nofollow
Softer, Gentler Google
46. @patrickstox
Anchor text likely greater signal gain than PageRank
The crawling and indexing part is even more important
Likely used for better spam identification
Range of values passed. Full, partial, none
Signals Speculation
47. @patrickstox
I need a rel=“meh” that passes partial signals.
***this is not a thing
What About Something For Those Of Us
That Can’t Decide
51. @patrickstox
It had become a common practice to nofollow all
external links.
Wikipedia - 2007
News sites – Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, CNN, NFL
Many sites in certain countries
Why Did They Change Nofollow?
69. @patrickstox
rel=“nofollow ugc” – forum comments, blog
comments
rel=“ugc sponsored” – advertorials, paid guest
posts
You Can Use More Than One Attribute
70. @patrickstox
According to the HTML spec, they should use a
space to separate.
Google will handle spaces, commas, and other
punctuation.
Rel Attributes Are Parsed With Flexible
Standards
71. @patrickstox
You can’t use these new attributes at a page level
like you could with nofollow. They apply as
attributes on specific links.
<a rel=“nofollow,ugc,sponsored” href=“https://abc.com”>attributes can be added
here</a>
& <link rel=“alternate nofollow ugc”
Not Here: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,ugc,sponsored"/>
Tip: Don’t Confuse Link Attribute & Meta
Robots