4. Consideration for No-follow Links

Before this update, no-follow links were not accorded relevance to your ranking after Google bot crawled your site. But with this last update, Google has decided to accord it some consideration. This means that they will count towards the consideration of your webpage for ranking.

Google now accepts to consider such links as descriptors of the context of the webpage that they point at and when they evaluate the links carefully, they will be able to bring up unnatural linking patterns.

In the update, sites with no-follow links from authoritative sites ranked higher than sites that did not have links at all. But site owners may still indicate links that should not be accorded the strength of a first-party endorsement.

Other areas of Google update bordered on sites that provided links to local businesses. Such sites that directed users where to get products and services closer to their locality gained in the ranking.

Sites that helped users find what they were looking for without obstruction or delay also gained rank. However, most sites with thin content experienced a drop in traffic and ranking. Also, sites that stuffed so many keywords did not gain.

Google tries to encourage sites to produce content based on what users seek (search intent), especially in terms of queries that require direct answers or those that require some level of expertise.

In their usual manner, Google also rewarded sites that had natural backlinks. Having such links is an indication that such sites can be trusted and that they have worked really hard to earn their links.