Internal and external linking are essential topics that every SEO needs to learn.
Links send users to external sites or can be used internally to keep people on your site and help search engines find more of your pages.
Over time, you’ll find links that you want to “explain” to search engines, such as:
Sponsored links. User Generated Content (UGC) links. Nofollow links.
Using these attributes correctly gives you greater control over how search engines identify and rank certain links. Learn to master these three values to “grade” your site’s links.
Common links are created using simple HTML, such as:
Land of seekers
If you have this “normal” link on your site, you can expect Google to follow the link and crawl the page without qualifiers. It’s a standard link that Google will make its own judgment on.
Let’s say you have user generated links but you can’t handle moderation.
If you allow these links to be crawled without the proper “rel” value, it’s possible that someone will spam your site, causing your ranking to drop.
In such cases, consider using the following:
Ludwig’s blog
When you add the rel=”ugc” you are telling the search engines that this is user generated content.
Over time, as you start to trust a particular user and realize that their contributions add immense value to your community, you can remove the UGC value.
If your site is doing well and an advertiser offers to pay for a link or an ad on your site, you can add the following:
Using rel=”sponsored” allows you to tell search engines that the link is not spam but sponsored. review Google Spam Policy to ensure that your site is not seen as spam to its users.
Finally, if you have a link that you don’t want search engines to crawl, you can use rel=”nofollow” as we did in the previous examples.
When you use this parameter, you are telling search engines not to pass “ranking credit” to the page.
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As a site owner or manager, you have control over your domain, but not over others.
For example, let’s say you have a website about cats and someone offers you $500 to advertise their cat beds on your site.
When you check out the advertiser’s site, you’ll see great cat beds that your audience will love and approve of the sponsored link.
A month or two goes by, and when you come back, it’s redirected to a torrent website you don’t want to be associated with.
It’s easy for the site owner to create a redirect from their page to another, and they can even do something manipulative, such as:
Redirect your IP address to the cat site. Send anything not marked as your IP address to a spam site.
If you find yourself in a scenario where this could happen, a rel=”sponsored” tag will identify the link as a paid agreement.
In the above case, you might also want to consider the rel=”nofollow” tag, which means you don’t want to pass credit to the site.
I recommend identifying sponsored links as rel=”sponsored” because search engines prefer you to.
For example, if you write a sponsored product review on your site, would you add rel=”sponsored” to the link?
Google’s John Mueller, who I’ll be referring to a lot in the next few sections, says:
“No, within the site isn’t really a problem, since you’re just linking from one part of your site to another.”
You can see the question and all the answers in the tweet below:
Hello @JohnMu – question about link attributes:
If you have pages on your site that offer a sponsored review of a brand/product with affiliate links (and that’s the whole purpose of the page), the internal links to those pages should contain some attribute (rel=sponsored, etc.)?
YOU 🙏🏽
— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) January 4, 2022
Identification of user-generated content
User-generated content can provide a wealth of information to your community.
But there’s a reason you see so many blogs removing their comment sections: spam is out of control.
Others may use any user-generated content to spam your site.
It’s an unfortunate consequence of offering user-generated content on your site.
You want to use the rel=”ugc” tag for:
Forum Posts. comments Users can add content anywhere.
Instead of taking my word for it, hear Mueller’s thoughts on the matter:
It states the following:
Google doesn’t differentiate between what you write and what your users write on your site. If the content is published on your site, it will be used for ranking purposes. Webmasters who publish user-generated content should moderate it before allowing it to be published. Webmasters cannot index content before using moderation . You cannot guarantee links before post moderation, so use the rel=”ugc” attribute.
Following these guidelines will protect your site from potential user-generated spam.
Using nofollow on links
If the link you’re linking to is external, you may want to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute to tell search robots not to follow the link.
A general rule of thumb is that if you’re adding an attribute that doesn’t belong in the UGC or sponsored category, use nofollow.
Over the years, I’ve learned many best practices for using the nofollow attribute, including:
Avoid using this attribute when you link to your social media profiles. Consider using rel=”me” for your social pages because they are a representation of you. Do not use nofollow to try to de-index. Instead, use noindex as in the previous section.
It is also important to note this “nofollow” is not a damping factor. Even if you add this attribute to a link, it does not decrease the value of the link. Instead, the link has no value
A lot of people tend to debate that, but Mueller cleared it up in a 2022 tweet.
Even so, many industry experts claim to see an increase in rankings, even if the link is a nofollow.
You will have to make your own judgment and implement the link attributes accordingly.
If you have a large enterprise site, like many clients I work with, it’s essential to have policies and procedures in place for developers and anyone who publishes content.
You can create rules and instances when stakeholders add link attributes.
You don’t need to use these link attributes if you don’t see a need for them on your site. Many of my blog posts do not include these attributes because I link to high quality sites.
However, when the content is sponsored or user-generated, these attributes serve as useful tools to control how search engines qualify links.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land. Staff authors are listed here.
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