Nofollow was introduced in 2005 by Google to fight comment spam. As the world of blogging expanded, people misused the comments on blogs to create inlinks to improve their SEO. This tag was introduced to indicate that this inlink should not contribute link juice to the linked site but now it has been misused to other side. Nobody wants to link to any other site. This pretty much defeats the purpose of web though. The whole idea of web was that you could jump from one site to another with just a click and if nobody wants to pass link juice then what’s the approach you use to figure out which site is more important than others.
So the update Google has done in Sep, 2019 is where nofollow now has three flavours. One flavour is to indicate ugc and the other one to indicate sponsored content and third one is the regular nofollow. Obviously Google will now use regular nofollow to pass on some link juice or atleast take it as a hint to decide how much juice has to be passed.
So here is what you need to do to make sure your SEO strategy is right
- Don’t do nofollow to your own content
- Don’t do nofollow to your reputed sites
- Do a nofollow only when you are not sure of the quality of links
- Replace UGC and Sponsored links for new tag usages ( although Google will say this is not necessary )