ide on SEO for nofollow links, sponsored links and UGC.
Internal and external links is a topic that every should be familiar with.
Use links to send visitors to other sites, or to help search engines discover more pages on your website.
You’ll eventually find links you wish to “explain” in search engines.
- Sponsored Links
- Links to User-generated Content (UGC).
- Nofollow links
You can control how search engines categorize and identify certain links by using these attributes correctly. To “qualify” your links, you need to learn how to use all three values.
Nofollow, sponsored and UGC links are regular links.
Simple HTML is used to create regular links, like:
You can expect Google will parse your page if you use this “regular link” on your website. Google will judge the link based on its standard.
Assume you have links generated by users but cannot handle moderation.
You can allow spammers to use your website by crawling these links without using the “rel” value.
Consider using the following in such situations:
By adding the rel="ugc to your HTML code, you are telling search engines this content is created by users.
As you get to know a user better and see that their contributions are of great value to your community you can start to remove the UGC value.
You can include the following if your site is performing well and you receive an offer from an advertiser to pay for links or ads on your website:
rel="sponsoredallows search engines to know that the link in question is not spam, but sponsored. Check Google’s Spam Policy before you publish your website to ensure that it is not seen as spamming users.
You can also use rel="nofollow". to block search engines from crawling a particular link.
By using this parameter you are telling the search engines to not give credit to your page for ranking.
When and why to use sponsored, UGC or nofollow links
You have full control over the domain you own or manage, but not those of others.
Let’s say, for example, you have a cat-related website and someone offers $500 to promote their cat beds on it.
You will see that the audience is going to love the cat beds and the link sponsored by the advertiser.
After a month or so, you come back to find that the website has been redirected.
Site owners can easily create a redirection from one page to another. They can even manipulate the process, for example:
- You can redirect your IP address to our cat website.
- Send anything that is not marked as your IP to a spam website.
A rel="sponsored tag identifies the link as an agreement that is paid for.
You may want to use the rel="nofollowtag if you do not want the credit to be given to the website.
Search engines prefer that you identify sponsored links by rel="sponsored.
What happens if a sponsored link is an internal link?
Would you, for example, add rel="sponsored” to the link if you wrote a product review sponsored by a company on your website?
John Mueller from Google, to whom I will refer a lot in this section, says:
“It’s not a big deal, you are just linking one section of your website to another.”
The tweet below contains the question, the answers and the entire discussion.
Hello @JohnMu, question regarding link attributes.
Internal links to these pages should have attributes such as rel=sponsored or affiliate. )?
TY
Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc)
January 4, 2022
Identification of user-generated content
User generated contentcan be a great source of information for your community.
There’s a good reason why so many blogs have removed their comment sections. Spam is out of hand.
Any user-generated content can be used to spam your website.
This is a negative consequence of allowing users to post content on your website.
You can use the rel="ugc tag to:
- Forum posts.
- Comments.
- Users can add content anywhere.
Listen to Mueller’s thoughts on the subject instead of my own:
He says the following:
- Google does not distinguish between the content you post and that of your users.
- The content that is published on your website will be used to determine the ranking.
- Moderators should be able to moderate user-generated material before it is published.
-
Noindexing is a tool that webmasters use to remove content from their indexes before moderating.
. - Use the attribute to ensure that the links are valid before they’re moderated.
By following these guidelines, your website will be protected from spam and other unwanted content.
Use nofollow links
Use the rel="nofollow attribute if the link is external to tell the search bots to not follow the link.
Use nofollow if the attribute you are adding does not fall under UGC or sponsored.
Over the years I have learned many best practices when using the nofollow attribute.
- Do not use when linking to social media profiles.
- Use rel=”me” on your social media pages as they are a representation you.
- Use noindex instead of nofollow in order to stop indexing. Use noindex instead, as in the previous section.
Note that ‘nofollow’ is not a factor. This attribute does not reduce the value of a link. The link instead has value.
Mueller clarified the issue in a tweet from 2022.
Many industry experts still claim that they see a ranking boost even if a link is nofollow.
Link attributes should be implemented based on your own judgment.
Nofollow links, sponsored links and UGC are implemented.
It’s important to create policies and procedures that are followed by developers and those who post content on your site.
When stakeholders add links attributes, you can create rules or instances.
If you do not need these attributes on your website, then don’t use them. These attributes are not included in many of my blog entries because I only link to high-quality websites.
These attributes are useful for controlling the way search engines classify links when they are sponsored or generated by users.
The first time Search Engine Land published the post A guide to SEO for nofollow, UGC, and sponsored links.