There has been some confusion, sorry to say it, around this nofollow link attribute change from last September. In short, Google made a change to the nofollow link policy, that starting on March 1, 2020, Google can look at a nofollow link attribute as a hint and not as a directive. Google said in September they can use it as a hint for ranking and in March as a hint for crawling and indexing.

Google say we should not expect to see changes in search with this change. Currently, it seems like this is just a policy change and nothing was actually changed here – but it is hard to say. We know Gary Illyes of Google is working something up around this.

So when Google talked about its spam metrics in this new blog post, it summed up some of the nofollow changes. In which, AJ Kohn asked on Twitter, “Did I miss the announcement that rel=sponsored and rel=ugc would be used for ranking purposes?”

Danny Sullivan of Google responded:

Danny added that there is no disadvantage for using the new rel sponsored or UGC link attributes:

He then goes on to say, why would anyone think there is a difference with ranking here from before:

Then Gary Illyes from Google comes in and explains more what Google means about “hints” and when/how they might use it:

In the interview with Marie Haynes, she asked John Mueller:

John Mueller of Google responded:

So are you more or less confused?

Maybe when Gary Illyes releases what he is working on, it will be clearer?

Forum discussion at Twitter.