Recent changes by Google in rel nofollow attribute treatment
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Hello, I’ve been using your plugin as additional protection from some non wanted traffic and it was functioning fine in past, until recently when one of the web sites undergo a huge drop in Google index with 90% pages excluded from the index.
I’m about to ask whether there are chances that changes Google set active recently from the March 1st for “nofollow” links to be treated rather as “hint” and not necessary as rule – are meaning the links are *partly followed and possible that “wanted” crawlers are getting trapped/blocked, so would that mean that BHBB is not operational by this method, leaving it only with robots.txt check of crawlers rule abidance ?
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On Tuesday 10 September Google announced that it was changing the way it views the “nofollow” link attribute.
When it comes to ‘nofollow’ links, there is no more ‘one rule fits all’. Instead, the search engine will be looking for ‘hints’ for link attribution
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Hey Jeff, and thank you for clarifying. I can confirm that WP version Blackhole for Bad Bots is fully functioning no active websites problems in indexing presently. In addition have to ask, is a set of ok-bots exclusion/whitelisting also provided in the standalone version downloadable from perishablepress?
One specific non-WP e-shop site I’m working with, till recently had huge problems since March 1st’ introduction of Google new rel “non follow” to partly follow practice, and since for weeks I’ve been examining occasional drop and blocking of some of the Google bots/services. For example, that particular website was accessible with the above average scoring at Google Page Speed insights, while Google mobile friendly testing service had problems reporting non accessible page.
Google WMT has been providing vary results, for days pages in index that again out with notifying as 500 inaccessible server error.
Also to mention that during all the trial period e-shop is under everyday bots probing from aws to cn bots, content scrapers and hacking bot nets.Thank you
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