PSA: From 1st March 2020 Google Switched Nofollow Is a Hint for Crawling and Indexing Purposes
https://webmasters.googleblog.comBack in September 2019 when Google announced the UGC and sponsored link attribute they made another announcement. As of March 1st 2020, Google will treat the nofollow link attribute as a hint, as opposed to a directive, for crawling and indexing purposes.
What does that mean: previously if a link is nofollow Googlebot will NOT follow it so it won’t crawl or index it BUT now Google can choose to follow it, for example, it may think a nofollow on Wikipedia or a national newspaper’s editorial section may be worth following and indexing but a nofollow link from joe’s uncles site maybe not worth following. It’s up to Google to decide if they will follow and index the content from a nofollow link.
As for ranking sponsored, ugc and nofollow were all considered as hints from September 2019, which basically means it’s up to Google to decide if a link with sponsored, ugc or nofollow attribute should pass any ranking benefit a.k.a link juice.
