Evolving “nofollow” – new ways to identify the nature of links

Google has announced that the nofollow link attribute (i.e. rel=”nofollow“) will be seen as a “hint” rather than as a directive for ranking purposes. In addition, Google is adding two additional link attributes, in addition to the rel=”nofollow” to provide a bit more context about the content you’re linking to.

Google Updates The Search Quality Raters Guidelines On September 5th

Google has updated the Google search quality raters guidelines handbook on September 5, 2019. That is 16-weeks after it last updated the guidelines and before that, it was about 10-months since Google updated that document. The live guidelines are 167 page PDF right now, which is one page larger than last time. The biggest changes primarily appear in the Your Money, Your Life sites, site reputation and content quality. 

Google now gives more preference to original reporting in search

Google said it has “made ranking updates” to “better recognize and surface original reporting more prominently in Search and ensure it stays there longer.” So original reporting will not just show up higher in the search results but show up for a longer period of time for the relevant query in Google search. “This means readers interested in the latest news can find the story that started it all, and publishers can benefit from having their original reporting more widely seen,” Richard Gingras said.