2. @patrickstox
• Product Advisor, Technical SEO, &
Brand Ambassador at
• I wrote for Search Engine Land, now Ahrefs blog
• I speak at some conferences like SMX, Pubcon, UnGagged,
TechSEO Boost
• Organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup (most successful in US),
the Beer & SEO Meetup, the Raleigh SEO Conference, and
Findability Conference
• Judge: 2017/18/19 US Search Awards, 2017/18/19 UK Search
Awards, 2018/19 Interactive Marketing Awards
• Founder Technical SEO Slack Group (message me for 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?
55. @patrickstox
• 15.3% nofollow
• 0.44% ugc
• 0.1% sponsored
Data For Top 110k Sites By Ahrefs Rank
% Of Unique Domains Linking To Sites With Attribute
57. @patrickstox
• 38,841 / 110,000 nofollow
• 3,367 / 110,000 ugc
• 151 / 110,000 sponsored
Data For Top 110k Sites By Ahrefs Rank
Count Of Domains Using Attributes On Internal Links
58. @patrickstox
• 3.6% nofollow
• 0.0002% ugc
• 0.0016% sponsored
Data For Top 110k Sites By Ahrefs Rank
Internal Link Totals
59. @patrickstox
Share these #SMXInsights on your social channels!
• Websites are adopting ugc and sponsored
• Websites are likely overusing nofollow on external and internal
links
67. @patrickstox
rel="nofollow ugc“ – forum comments, blog comments
rel="ugc sponsored“ – advertorials, paid guest posts
You Can Use More Than One Attribute
68. @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
69. @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” href=“https://abc.com”>attributes can be added here</a>
Not Here: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/>
Tip: Don’t Confuse Link Attribute & Meta Robots