News from Episode 326 with Joe Martinez

Host Erin Sparks and Guest Joe Martinez discuss this weeks trending topics:

Google Changes the Meta Robots Nofollow Tag from a Directive to a Hint

The Nofollow page tag was previously a directive to stop a web crawler from following links, but now it’s just a hint, which means a Google crawler may or may not obey the Nofollow tag. 

Google Launches Two New Link Attribution Tags

rel=“sponsored” is for links created as part of advertising, sponsorships, etc. and rel=“ugc” is for links in user generated content. Both will be treated as hints for links to exclude as ranking signals. 

Google Says Ranking Factors Don’t Include Content Accuracy

Google thinks machine learning isn’t quite good enough yet at assessing content accuracy to make it a ranking factor, which is why it relies instead on various signals for topic relevance and authority.