nofollow, sponsored and ugc

Sooner or later you will link to something you do not want to vouch for: an advertiser, a comment somebody else left, a site you are citing as an example of what not to do. Google gives you three small attributes for saying so, and using them wrongly is one of the few link mistakes that can be corrected in an afternoon.

What the three attributes are

A link normally looks like <a href="https://example.com">. A link attribute adds a rel value to it that describes your relationship with the destination. There are three that matter:

• rel="sponsored" — the link exists because of an advertisement, a sponsorship, or some other payment or compensation.
• rel="ugc" — user-generated content. Links inside comments, forum posts, reviews: things visitors put on your site, not things you wrote.
• rel="nofollow" — a general "I do not want to endorse this". The oldest of the three, and still correct when the other two do not fit.

They can be combined. A paid link inside a comment is rel="ugc sponsored". A link with no attribute at all is the default, and the default is an endorsement: it says you stand behind the page you are pointing at.

How Google treats them

Since 2020, Google treats all three as hints rather than commands. That word is doing real work. Historically nofollow meant Google would not follow the link at all; today Google may still use it for crawling and for understanding the shape of the web, while taking your signal about endorsement into account. You are telling Google something true about the link, not switching it off.

Two consequences follow, and both surprise people.

First, nofollow is not a way to keep a page out of Google. It says nothing about indexing. If you need a page kept out of search results, that is a noindex tag on the page itself — see sitemaps and robots.txt for why the two are constantly confused.

Second, marking paid links is not optional politeness. Google's spam policies treat buying or selling links that pass ranking signals as a link scheme. Adding sponsored is precisely what turns a paid link from a policy violation into a perfectly ordinary advertisement.

What to do

• Add rel="sponsored" to every link you were paid for, in any form — advertising, sponsorship, affiliate links, a free product sent in exchange for coverage.
• Set your comment system and forum to add rel="ugc" automatically. Most platforms have this on by default; check yours rather than assuming.
• Use plain rel="nofollow" when you are linking to something to criticise or examine it, and do not want to be read as recommending it.
• Leave editorial links alone. A link you chose, to a source you believe, with no money involved, should carry no attribute at all — that is what an ordinary link is.
• If you accept guest posts, decide the policy once and apply it to every author link, rather than case by case.

Common mistakes

Adding nofollow to your own internal links. This was once promoted as a way to steer authority around your own site. Google's guidance does not support it, and internal links are how your own pages get discovered in the first place.

Assuming an affiliate link is exempt. Affiliate links are compensated links. They need qualifying like any other.

Treating nofollow as a punishment. Marking a link does not harm the site you linked to. It describes your relationship with it, which is all it has ever claimed to do.

Sources: Qualify your outbound links to Google and Spam policies for Google web search.