With all this discussion around the changes to how Google treats the nofollow link attribute, Bing chimed in about how they treat it. Fabrice Canel from the Bing search team said on Twitter "we always treated the nofollow link attribute as a ‘hint’, making our own decision on trusting or not trusting."

So while Google always took it more like a directive for rankings, indexing and crawling. Bing always took it as a hint and may do what they want with it despite what attribute you slap on that link.

Now Google takes it as a hint for ranking, will take it as a hint for crawling and indexing in March. Bing has always taken it as a hint.

Fabrice Canel from Bing added "Please continue using this ‘hint’ and other link functions as sponsored and ugc as appropriate."

Here is his tweet:

Historically at @bing, we always treated the nofollow link attribute as a ‘hint’, making our own decision on trusting or not trusting. Please continue using this ‘hint’ and other link functions as sponsored and ugc as appropriate. — Fabrice Canel (@facan) September 10, 2019

To learn more about all the changes around nofollow and link attributes Google announced yesterday, see this story.

Forum discussion at Twitter.