The new rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" link attributes
 

Use them AND demand your programmers/tube-script providers update their scripts to comply.

... you will thank me later


https://webmasters.googleblog.com/20...-identify.html

You dont need this at all...

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-...ugc-28196.html

You only need to use, If you wanna to give google more data about links, otherwise, NOFOLLOW is perfetcly fine!
I guess Google doesn't have enough data, right?

If you want to rank on your content rather than the users comment to your videos/content, you should make it #1-5 priority to implement the changes - no matter if your programmer or script-provider want to or not. You ARE hurting your rankings.

It's one of the reasons Wordpress are including it as well

You dont "need" to do anything, but if you want to rank well for your content, you "should" do it... or sit back watching your ranks die

You know who are Gary, right?

Bookmarked

you mean Barry? yes I know who he is.

Read the link I posted. Saying "you dont have to do anything" is utterly false.

Do what you want - I could care less - I'm just sharing knowledge. If you want to join the Paul Markham tribe, then go ahead.

This would apply to affiliates mostly yes? Not Program owners?

Correct...

Perhaps a good idea then would be, as a Program Owner, for me to contact all my Affiliates and bring this news to their attention. :)

Thanks for sharing this important info!

No, I mean Gary Illyes who tweeted this is not required, at least you really wanna give google more data..... and He is the guy that said "you dont have to do anything"..... If you dont know who he is.... google his name

You are spreading BS...
As you said, I dont care either :upsidedow
Give them everything they ask for it.... and I dont know who the fuck is Paul Markham and I know nothing about his tribe, maybe cause I dont spend tons of time in this forum to care at all

^you don't know who THE Paul Markham is?

If he doesn't put money on my table.... Why should I have to know/care?

:2 cents:

Let me put it this way;
1 - my link is to the documentation and google's recommendations
2 - your link is to a webmasterblog that makes money by people clicking his banners

:1orglaugh you decide your source of truth and who to trust.. grats to the winners

I implemented this tag as soon as it was introduced, as I have nothing to hide.

I'm now getting more G traffic than ever before, so I guess Matt Cutt's successor noticed someone actually using the tag and decided that was worthy of some love :upsidedow

The url was just to show what we know so far... there you can find couple of twitters from people working on Google.... Gary (not barry) is one of them... but forget, I dont have time for this

Just changed my links to "nofollow sponsored" at one of my scripts, waiting for the huge google boost in 3.2.1...!

I think you misunderstood this information from google.

rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc" are just ADDITIONAL attributes that can be used alone or together.

the nofollow attribute still makes a lot of sense if you mark ads, external links that you do not want to be part of your content and internal links that are not relevant.

if you use rel="ugc" means that you recommend this as a relevant link to a user generated content.
if you use rel="nofollow ugc" means you tell google that this is user generated but you do not want the content as part of your site
if you use rel="sponsored" you just tell google that someone paid somehow for it but you see it as relevant to your content
if you use rel="nofollow sponsored" means that someone paid for it but you do not want that google counts the target as relevant to your content.
if you use rel="nofollow" it can be whatever else that you do not want to be counted to your websites content.

the big misunderstanding is the standard html-attribute "nofollow".
regarding to W3C it was basically created to prevent searchengines following this link.
but it is not how Google understand it. Google just does not count this link as an information that is connected to the site´s content but follows.

the rel-attribute is standard html and there are many others that can be used to display the hypertext dependencies of an HTML file (i.e "alternate" "author" "copyright" etc)
Google just extended them for their own logic with "ugc" and "sponsored"

Interesting, could rel=sponsored be seen as "legit paid backlink" ?

well possibly yes and that would be quite cool.

it is not forbidden to pay for advertising and a paid link is nothing else than that.

so with rel="sponsored" the site that set this link shows that there was something in exchange BUT as long as it is not rel="nofollow sponsored" it shows also that it is a
relevant information that can be seen as part of the content where the link shows up.

so rel="sponsored" tells google only that you got something in exchange BUT you stand for it
rel="nofollow sponsored" says that you are young and need the money :-)

actually outgoing links are misinterpreted also.
I have a lot of sites in the SERPS that do ONLY have outgoing links and nothing else but NO incoming links.

It is all a question of sense. If a link makes sense it can help the site that is giving the link more than the site that is receiving the link.

I have really NEVER believed in the most SEO-tricks. I have NEVER tried to hide my network, using different class A and B networks - I was even linking reciprocally and all that stuff that is a "NOGO" if you follow the usual SEO guidelines.
I always played with open cards to Google and focused on logic, machine readability, data sorting, categorization and additional content information. I used search console and tried to deeply understand analytics - that´s all.

Nope.

I linked to google's documentation

The only thing I said was:
1 - make sure you understand this change/feature
2 - if you buy scripts/saas/design - make sure your developer understands it as well

All our services have already implemented the change. What people do with the knowledge is their choice.


People can stick to nofollow or nothing at all if they want.. not my problem :)

well if someone is using nofollow means for me that he know, that this link will not effect his site at all - not positive and not negative and there is no change in that.

ugc and sponsored are just 2 new and additional attributes and they make more sense if they are used with a dofollow link and in rare cases in combination with a nofollow.

so yes - if you have a dofollow link on your page with NO attribute and you link it either internal or external to user generated content, it make MUCH sense to use ugc
it also makes much sense to use it on a sponsored link if you want that google understand this link as part of your page.

i.e if one runs a price comparison portal all his outgoing links do have usually affiliate parameters. so this is in fact a sponsored link. but this represents not only your business model - this is also the value a user finds on your page.
to add here a "sponsored" and keep the link dofollow makes a lot of sense because it EXPLAINS the affiliate id and dynamic parameters that are on this link.

Interesting. Does Google explain anywhere how these might be valued +/- for ranking?

google never explains anything about those values.
all information you can find about values +/- are fairy-tales

Nope - they never go into details about it. You need to do your own testing.

One thing Google will tell you, it to always have a customer centric approach, and never a searchengine centric approach

Can anyone here who uses the WP plugin 'Pretty Links' tell me if it the html rel tag is still read by Google? I was putting the tag to 'nofollow' in the Pretty Links settings and also putting a rel="nofollow" in the html just to be on the safe side. Now I'm going to trial this new rel="sponsor", but will it be read by Google (I'll leave the "nofollow" checkbox blank in the Pretty Links settings).