Occasionally Google places extra text beneath the search box, usually highlighting an event, although on some occasions it has been used for disaster relief and to promote Android.
Last week during the annual Star Wars Day “May the Fourth be with you”, Google placed a promotional link on the homepage for Google Play, which led to the Google Play page for purchasing the Star Wars movies. And I happened to notice it was a followed link.
Google has now made a change and links in that section of the Google homepage are now being no followed. Since Star Wars Day, Google has added text for both remembering the end of World War II and for Mother’s Day, and both of them were nofollow links.
Here is how the code for that section looks now:
The nofollow appears across the multiple country versions of Google’s homepages that I checked, including Google.ca and Google.co.uk.
It is nice to see Google make this change, even though it is debatable just how much a one day link would benefit those pages in the long run. But it does also bring it in line with their own webmaster guidelines.
Jennifer Slegg
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Tad Chef says
Last time I checked Google.com had also hidden links to YouTube etc. without using “nofollow”.