Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
After going through this module, you should be able to understand the use and importance of sponsored and UGC attributes as well as how they affect SEO. You should also be able to use these attributes to optimize your website.
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What is the purpose of using UGC attribute tags?
What is the purpose of the sponsored attribute?
What is the purpose of the noarchive attribute?
What should be avoided when creating outbound links?
What should you consider when linking to external websites?
What is the recommended attribute for outbound links?
2.7.1 What Are Nofollow, Sponsored and UGC Attributes?
Publishers can add UGC and sponsored attribute tags to outbound links to help Googlebot to better understand the nature of links.
Until Google introduced the two new link attributes in September 2019, nofollow tags were used to flag sponsored or advertising links that failed to meet Google’s guidelines.
The nofollow link attribute was first introduced in January 2005 to address comment spamming issues and to identify untrusted links from user-generated content (UGC). By September that year, Google was also recommending its use for advertising-related links.
The nofollow link attribute was considered a signal for Google not to count the link, so PageRank wasn’t transferred to it. If you wanted to ensure that Google ignored the link or didn’t follow it for indexing or crawling, you could simply add rel= “nofollow” to the link.
Nofollow is used for untrusted links and is considered a hint for crawling and ranking. That means, crawlers can either consider it or ignore it, depending on the situation. It is used in cases where you want to link to a page but don’t intend to indicate any endorsement.
Any outbound links that don’t fall under UGC and sponsored attributes and you don’t wish Google to either associate with your site or crawl need to be marked as nofollow.
Popular websites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, and Twitch mark all their outbound links as nofollow links.
Any form of marketing, advertising or paid links should be marked with the sponsored attribute.
The UGC attribute is used to mark links mentioned in content such as forum posts or user comments.
If your website receives a steady flow of user comments, checking the quality of every suggested link becomes difficult. Marking user-posted links with the UGC attribute helps Google understand why such links were added and whether those links should be included in PageRank calculation.
You can remove this attribute if you wish to recognize trustworthy users who make useful contributions.
These tags can be combined to help with backward compatibility as some search engines still don’t recognize UGC and sponsored attributes.
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So, what are some of the questions/concerns that publishers have regarding UGC and sponsored link attributes?
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We have addressed these concerns in detail throughout this module.
Internal and external linking are crucial components of Google’s ranking algorithm and the information contained therein will see websites climb up or slide down the search engine results pages (SERPs).
If the content on your website has outbound links, Google recommends using an appropriate link attribute for each. However, these link attributes are merely hints for site rankings.
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Now that we have a firm grasp of what these attributes do, let’s look at a few scenarios where they can be implemented.
When it comes to outbound links used in coupons/vouchers/offers websites, it is mandatory to use link attributes to adhere to Google guidelines.
Listed below are different scenarios and the relevant attributes one should use for such websites.
Here are some scenarios applicable to coupon links submitted via user-generated content:
Link building is an important SEO strategy. But what happens when you do not intend to vote for a page you are linking to or when you are getting paid to link to a webpage or when spammy links are posted on your website in the user-generated content section?
In such scenarios, Google recommends using nofollow, sponsored, or UGC link attributes. Refer to the cases below to identify the links that need attributes and the appropriate link attribute for them.
Sponsored and UGC attributes are still not recognized by some search engines hence we advise combining them with the nofollow attribute.
You don’t need to make any changes to already existing links that are marked as nofollow. However, Google recommends using UGC and sponsored attributes as per the type of outbound links used in the future.
Adding attributes to links in WordPress depends on the editor you’re using. For example, the Gutenberg editor allows you to easily add the nofollow and sponsored link attributes.
You won’t need to worry about the UGC attribute, as WordPress 5.3 introduced support for the UGC nofollow by default.
Let’s look at how we can edit links with Gutenberg.
To view attribute options, click on the down arrow as shown in the image below.
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The Gutenberg editor allows you to view the backend code. Just click on the three dots button and select the Edit as HTML option.
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Once you select this option, you will see that WordPress has automatically added two more attributes to the code.
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Click on the three dots buttons to select the “Edit Visually” option in the drop-down menu to go back to visual mode.
Gutenburg is not the only WordPress editor, however. For example, SODP uses Elementor. Each editor will have a different process to customize link attributes — here are the processes if you’re using Elementor process — so be sure to check your editor’s documentation.
If you’re using affiliate links on your website then it’s important to add a disclosure. While not directly tied to SEO, disclosing the nature of affiliate links to your audience is key to transparency and building trust with your visitors.
Moreover, for publishers in the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) requires you to inform visitors of any potential compensation opportunities associated with affiliate links.
You can include disclosure notices fairly easily with any number of plugins or widgets. Here are a few examples:
While there are no pitfalls around using the sponsored and UGC attributes per se, you still need to be wary of depending on them to the detriment of best practices.
If there is financial compensation involved with the outbound link on your website then it is necessary to declare the link with an attribute.
Whether the link points to the product or the advertiser’s webpage, you are strongly advised to use the sponsored attribute. In the case of paid links, Google recommends using the rel= “sponsored” attribute but the rel= “nofollow” attribute can work as a default catch-all.
But which attribute should you use when it comes to paid links mentioned in the user comments? In such a scenario, publishers are advised to mark the user-generated content with the nofollow attribute or a combination of nofollow and UGC.
Doing this can hurt your website’s SEO value. Linking excessively — such as having 50 outbound links in a 500-word article — makes the page appear like a link farm regardless of how well used your attributes are, hurting its chances to perform well in SERPs.
There is no rule of thumb for the number of links you can place on a page, but we’d advise that you don’t have more than one outbound link for every 100 words. This is not a Google approved rule, but it’s a standard that many publishers have adopted.
When you link to a website, you are telling your readers that you vouch for the site’s content. From our experience, we’ve seen that regularly linking to sites with explicit/shocking content can negatively impact the publisher’s own domain rating, regardless of whether the nofollow, UGC and sponsored link attributes are added or not.
There’s a reason why 4chan, one of the biggest and most controversial chat boards, doesn’t surface within Google’s SERPs. For example, a quick examination of ahrefs data on 4chan’s traffic, cross-referenced against Similar Web data, shows that it comes mostly from direct traffic on popular topics that 4chan should rank for in SERPs simply do not appear.
For example, even though 4chan has a huge library of Anime Wallpapers it doesn’t rank in top 100 for the keywords like “anime wallpapers”, while sites like Deviant Art, Pinterest etc. ranks in the top position.
Because 4chan publishes a lot of shocking and pornographic content with associated links, the entire site cluster appears to have been labelled along those lines.
Separately, linking to illegal streaming sites will likely lead to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations being filed, which also creates negative signals for the original domain.
Wirecutter is a well-known product review website owned by The New York Times.
Let’s explore its Cashmere sweater article to understand how it uses the sponsored link attribute.
When we inspect the HTML code for “$75 from Nadaam”. We can see how the sponsored attribute has been incorporated in the code to tell crawlers that it’s an affiliate link.
As we can see highlighted in the image above, the publication has used a combination of sponsored and noreferrer as its rel“=sponsored noreferrer” tag.
The noreferrer in the attribute instructs the browser to hide the referrer information when the link is clicked. It helps protect referral information from being passed to the destination website and hides referral traffic in Google Analytics.
Having read this article, you should now understand how the introduction of UGC and sponsored link attributes have changed the SEO landscape. You should also feel comfortable in using appropriate attributes for your website’s outbound links.
We recommend creating optimized content and using link-building to enhance your website’s visibility and SERP rankings.