Google Will Now Treat Meta Robots Nofollow as a Hint

Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Gary Illyes tweeted that Google is officially changing support for Meta Robots Nofollow. Google now treats the meta robots nofollow as a hint, similar to the behavior to the recently updated nofollow link attribute. The Meta Robots Nofollow tag was a directive. A directive are instructions that Google’s crawler (robot) is obligated to obey. The Meta Robots Nofollow was used to keep Google from crawling all links contained on a page. As of today, the Meta Robots Nofollow is no longer a directive.  It will be treated as a hint. That means that Google may or may not obey the Meta Robots Nofollow when it encounters it.