Hey there, let’s talk about John Mueller’s recent tweet! He’s a cool guy who works at Google and he tweeted something that was true but also a bit sarcastic. It seems that some people didn’t quite understand what he meant.
Basically, John said that the “rel=dofollow” attribute on links doesn’t really do anything for Google. In fact, Google would treat it the same way as if you used a made-up attribute like “rel=cheese” (yum!). The only link attributes that Google really cares about are “rel=nofollow”, “rel=sponsored”, and “rel=ugc”.
John even admitted that he sometimes puts funny things in his link attributes just to see if anyone will notice. But apparently, no one ever does!
After John tweeted this, he had to clarify a bit so that people wouldn’t start adding “dofollow” to all their links. So, let’s all remember to use the correct link attributes so that Google knows how to treat our links!
Just in case it wasn't clear from all the replies here, using an unknown rel-attribute on links doesn't do anything, and since the default behavior is to use links normally, this just treats links like links. You don't need to use rel=dofollow. You can, but you don't need to.
— johnmu is not a bard yet 馃枃锔忦煐囷笍 (@JohnMu) March 22, 2023
This is similar to robots meta tags. If you specify something unknown (to whatever is processing them), it will get ignored. So a "index" or "follow" robots meta tag will essentially do nothing, and by default that means indexing and following links is allowed.
— johnmu is not a bard yet 馃枃锔忦煐囷笍 (@JohnMu) March 22, 2023