It seems that Google plans on updating their Crawl system soon. It seems the major change is that they will now be using ‘nofollow’ links differently; they will now be used as a ‘hint’ while crawling and indexing.

I think nofollows might have been covered in class briefly, but I had to look it up to remind myself exactly what they were. They are used to prevent certain links on a website from influencing a page’s ranking.

Previously, Google did what I think they are supposed to do and did not crawl or index nofollow links. The article I’m basing this off describes how they will be treated as ‘hints’ for ‘crawling or indexing.’ To be honest I’m not exactly sure what this means.

The article finishes by saying that nofollows should not be used to prevent the indexing of a page, and recommends using something like what they call a “meta robots noindex directive.”

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