If you’ve done any link building or SEO, you’ll know that one of the big things to watch for are sites with “nofollow” tags.
This was a hard stop in the past, meaning sites that put the ‘nofollow’ attribute around your link, were passing no ‘link juice’ and as such those links were use less to boosting your SEO score.
It would seem times they are a changin’
In a post, Google said the were ‘evolving’ the ‘nofollow’ tag and were now going to consider it as a ‘hint’ (whatever that means) and not a hard stop directive.
They’re also adding two new tags, ‘sponsored’ and ‘ugc’ to the mix which further murkies the water. Google’s post says that they don’t expect dramatic ranking changes for existing sites, but that remains to be seen.
My assumption would be that a ‘sponsored’ post would carry less influence than a ‘ugc’ post which is arguably more genuine, but in typical fashion, there was no details as to how those tags would influence the search results.