Nofollow, UGC, and Sponsored Attributes
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Patrick Stox provides a summary of the history and evolution of nofollow, ugc, and sponsored attributes. Originally created to combat comment spam, nofollow was overused which led to Google missing 50% of the web. Google introduced ugc and sponsored to better classify links and pass partial ranking signals. Major platforms like WordPress are adopting the new attributes, but widespread adoption may be slow without incentives from Google. Stox provides best practices tips for using the attributes.
Nofollow, UGC, and Sponsored Attributes
- 1. @patrickstox NOFOLLOW AND UGC AND SPONSORED OH MY
- 2. @patrickstox • Product Advisor, Technical SEO, & Brand Ambassador at • I wrote for Search Engine Land, now Ahrefs blog • I speak at some conferences like SMX, Pubcon, UnGagged, TechSEO Boost • Organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup (most successful in US), the Beer & SEO Meetup, the Raleigh SEO Conference, and Findability Conference • Judge: 2017/18/19 US Search Awards, 2017/18/19 UK Search Awards, 2018/19 Interactive Marketing Awards • Founder Technical SEO Slack Group (message me for invite) • Moderator /r/TechSEO on Reddit Who is Patrick Stox?
- 3. @patrickstox A Brief History of Nofollow With The Plot of Some Book/Movie
- 6. @patrickstox Google Landed In The Fight
- 7. @patrickstox Everyone wanted Google’s PageRank PageRank
- 8. @patrickstox The Quest: Add Nofollow Attributes
- 9. @patrickstox https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing- comment-spam.html They Needed Help To Fight The Spam
- 10. @patrickstox https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/01/preventing-comment- spam.html Originally to combat comment spam <a rel="nofollow“ href=“http://abc.com”>don’t trust</a> Story 408: Nofollow
- 11. @patrickstox Brad Fitzpatrick - LiveJournal Dave Winer - Scripting News Anil Dash - Six Apart Steve Jenson - Blogger Matt Mullenweg - WordPress Stewart Butterfield - Flickr Anthony Batt - Buzznet David Czarnecki - blojsom Rael Dornfest - Blosxom Mike Torres - MSN Spaces Platforms Helped Them
- 12. @patrickstox Ross Rader - Blogware John Panzer - AOL Journals Kevin Marks - of Technorati also added a draft formal spec for nofollow. Reini Urban - PhpWiki David Gorman - ModBlog Arnab Nandi - Drupal James Tauber - Leonardo Jeremie Bouillon - points out a GPL plugin for Textpattern Simon Brown - Pebble Ilkka Huotari - Netdoc Shaun Inman - ShortStat Eaden McKee - bBlog Yariv Habot - backBlog John Lyons - enetation Steven Roussey - Network54 Will Yardley - Dreambook Samuel Klingen Daams - Travellerspoint Even More Platforms Helped Them
- 13. @patrickstox SEOs The Journey Was Fraught With Peril
- 14. @patrickstox Bought And Exchanged Links
- 15. @patrickstox Spammed Article Sites, Directories, Press Releases, Forum Links and Forum Profile Links
- 18. @patrickstox Web 2.0 Links And Tiered Linkbuilding
- 19. @patrickstox https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html Google Fought Back: Penguin Spam
- 20. @patrickstox https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2011/05/more-guidance- on-building-high-quality.html More guidance on building high-quality sites (EAT) Story 408: Recommended Reading
- 21. @patrickstox Some Wizard Guy Sort Of Helped Everyone
- 22. @patrickstox
- 23. @patrickstox You Either Die A Hero, Or You Live Long Enough To See Yourself Become The Villain
- 24. @patrickstox Businesses Shut Down, SEOs Feared Google
- 25. @patrickstox Links sellers, spam, and fear of penalties pushed many sites to nofollow all links. Many Sites Over-Reacted: Sitewide Nofollow
- 26. @patrickstox I’m not going to name names, but this happened in many niches and many countries. There were lots of weird Penguin recovery strategies too. In Some Cases Nofollowing Outbound Links Became A Recommended Strategy
- 27. @patrickstox Others Continued In Different Ways
- 28. @patrickstox Redirecting Expired Domains Or Building On Them
- 29. @patrickstox It was popular especially among affiliates to route through a path that was blocked from crawling or use JavaScript. Hidden Links
- 30. @patrickstox PBNs (Private Blog Networks)
- 32. @patrickstox Google Now Penalizing Subdomains Leasing, Not Just Subfolder Leasing https://www.seroundtable.com/google-penalizing-subdomains- leasing-28203.html Subdomain Leasing
- 33. @patrickstox Some Still Cling To The Old Ways
- 34. @patrickstox Penguin no longer penalizes, it just ignores bad links https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2016/09/penguin-is-now-part-of-our-core.html They were already ignoring signals from many links like affiliate links which they recommended people nofollow Softer, Gentler Google
- 35. @patrickstox https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/09/evolving- nofollow-new-ways-to-identify.html <a rel=“sponsored“ href=“http://abc.com”>I bought</a> <a rel=“ugc“ href=“http://abc.com”>It wasn’t me</a> New Attributes Sponsored And UGC
- 36. @patrickstox rel="sponsored“ Mark links that are advertisements or paid placements (commonly called paid links) as sponsored. Sponsored
- 37. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/1224704243543814144 Sponsored Applies To Affiliante Links Also
- 38. @patrickstox rel="ugc“ We recommend marking user-generated content (UGC) links, such as comments and forum posts, as ugc. UGC
- 39. @patrickstox Within A Day, Barry Already Used The New Attributes
- 40. @patrickstox Ahrefs Added Support In Less Than 2 Days
- 41. @patrickstox • Completely Ignored • Was not used for crawling • Did not pass signals Nofollow Before For Google
- 42. @patrickstox • PageRank • Anchor Text • ??? What Are Signals
- 43. @patrickstox Treated as hints for Ranking Same with Sponsored and UGC Nofollow Now
- 44. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/nicoleldeleon/status/1225427452912185345 Is Nofollow Used For Ranking Yet?
- 45. @patrickstox Will Also be treated as a hint for crawling and indexing March 1, 2020 Nofollow Soon
- 46. @patrickstox Anchor text likely greater signal gain than PageRank The crawling and indexing part is even more important Likely used for better spam identification Range of values passed. Full, partial, none Signals Speculation
- 47. @patrickstox I need a rel=“meh” that passes partial signals. ***this is not a thing What About Something For Those Of Us That Can’t Decide
- 48. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc/status/1181606837424029697 Google Missing 50% Of The Web
- 49. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/Marie_Haynes/status/1181606973004890112 Google Missing 50% Of The Web
- 50. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/jenstar/status/1181606557462609920 Google Missing 50% Of The Web
- 51. @patrickstox It had become a common practice to nofollow all external links. Wikipedia - 2007 News sites – Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, CNN, NFL Many sites in certain countries Why Did They Change Nofollow?
- 52. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/JohnMorabitoSEO/status/1181606513732751360 Why Did They Change Nofollow?
- 53. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/lilyraynyc/status/1181607939280257024 Kind Google: You Don’t Have To Change Anything
- 54. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/jenstar/status/1181607554725474304 Kind Google: You Don’t Have To Change Anything
- 55. @patrickstox • 15.3% nofollow • 0.44% ugc • 0.1% sponsored Data For Top 110k Sites By Ahrefs Rank % Of Unique Domains Linking To Sites With Attribute
- 56. @patrickstox • 10.6% nofollow • 0.016% ugc • 0.008% sponsored Data For Top 110k Sites By Ahrefs Rank External Link Totals
- 57. @patrickstox • 38,841 / 110,000 nofollow • 3,367 / 110,000 ugc • 151 / 110,000 sponsored Data For Top 110k Sites By Ahrefs Rank Count Of Domains Using Attributes On Internal Links
- 58. @patrickstox • 3.6% nofollow • 0.0002% ugc • 0.0016% sponsored Data For Top 110k Sites By Ahrefs Rank Internal Link Totals
- 59. @patrickstox Share these #SMXInsights on your social channels! • Websites are adopting ugc and sponsored • Websites are likely overusing nofollow on external and internal links
- 60. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/facan/status/1171477716673032192 Like Before, Partners Will Help Drive Adoption Bing
- 61. @patrickstox Ugc: • 5,653 WordPress • 7 Tiki Wiki • 2 Wix • 1 Drupal • 1 SharePoint Like Before, Partners Will Help Drive Adoption *Alpha CMS identifier, out of 7,130 sites: Sponsored: • 1,842 WordPress • 1 Wix • 1 Tiki Wiki
- 62. @patrickstox Added ugc in 5.3 https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-rel-nofollow-ugc/329109/ WordPress
- 63. @patrickstox Without any incentives or penalties, adoption will likely be slow This Might Take A While
- 65. @patrickstox https://twitter.com/jesseseogeek/status/1225428039867215872 Google: Good SEOs, Here’s A Carrot
- 66. @patrickstox What Else Should You Know
- 67. @patrickstox rel="nofollow ugc“ – forum comments, blog comments rel="ugc sponsored“ – advertorials, paid guest posts You Can Use More Than One Attribute
- 68. @patrickstox According to the HTML spec, they should use a space to separate. Google will handle spaces, commas, and other punctuation. Rel Attributes Are Parsed With Flexible Standards
- 69. @patrickstox You can’t use these new attributes at a page level like you could with nofollow. They apply as attributes on specific links. <a rel=“nofollow” href=“https://abc.com”>attributes can be added here</a> Not Here: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow"/> Tip: Don’t Confuse Link Attribute & Meta Robots
- 70. @patrickstox Delete Password Protection Noindex (but not in robots.txt) https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6062602 Don’t Use Nofollow To Block Pages From Being Indexed
- 71. @patrickstox SEE YOU AT THE NEXT SMX!