Patrick Stox on SEOFromHome talking about nofollow, ugc, and sponsored link attributes. Ahrefs data to show usage.

1. @patrickstox
NOFOLLOW AND UGC AND SPONSORED
OH MY

2. @patrickstox
Product Advisor, Technical SEO, &
Brand Ambassador at Ahrefs
• I write for Ahrefs blog but have written for many industry publications
in the past
• I speak at some conferences like SMX, Pubcon, UnGagged, TechSEO
Boost
• Organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup (most successful in US) and
the Beer & SEO Meetup
• We also run a conference, the Raleigh SEO Conference
• Founder Technical SEO Slack Group (message me for an invite)
• Moderator /r/TechSEO on Reddit
Who is Patrick Stox?

3. @patrickstox
A Brief History of Nofollow
With The Plot of Some Book/Movie

4. @patrickstox
In The Beginning
WWW

5. @patrickstox
Spam

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/preven
ting-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

16. @patrickstox
PageRank Sculpting

17. @patrickstox
Widgets And Templates

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)

31. @patrickstox
Guest Posting

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 Affiliate 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
• Surrounding 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
Is treated as a hint for crawling and indexing
Since March 1, 2020
Nofollow

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
We Looked At The Top 110k Sites By Ahrefs Rank
*Data from February 2020
https://ahrefs.com/blog/nofollow-ugc-sponsored/

56. @patrickstox https://ahrefs.com/blog/nofollow-ugc-sponsored/

57. @patrickstox https://ahrefs.com/blog/nofollow-ugc-sponsored/

58. @patrickstox https://ahrefs.com/blog/nofollow-ugc-sponsored/
This should be 0

59. @patrickstox https://ahrefs.com/blog/nofollow-ugc-sponsored/

60. @patrickstox https://ahrefs.com/blog/nofollow-ugc-sponsored/

61. @patrickstox
Websites are adopting ugc and sponsored
Websites are likely overusing nofollow on external
and internal links

62. @patrickstox
https://twitter.com/facan/status/1171477716673032192
Like Before, Partners Will Help Drive
Adoption
Bing

63. @patrickstox
Like Before, Partners Will Help Drive Adoption
We looked at the CMS used on 7,130 of the sites

64. @patrickstox
Added ugc in 5.3
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-rel-nofollow-
ugc/329109/
WordPress

65. @patrickstox
Without any incentives or penalties, adoption will
likely be slow
This Might Take A While

66. @patrickstox
https://twitter.com/GregGifford/status/1225427845759094785
Or Not:

67. @patrickstox
https://twitter.com/jesseseogeek/status/1225428039867215872
Google: Good SEOs, Here’s A Carrot

68. @patrickstox
What Else Should You Know

69. @patrickstox
rel=“nofollow ugc” – forum comments, blog
comments
rel=“ugc sponsored” – advertorials, paid guest
posts
You Can Use More Than One Attribute

70. @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

71. @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,ugc,sponsored” href=“https://abc.com”>attributes can be added
here</a>
& <link rel=“alternate nofollow ugc”
Not Here: <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow,ugc,sponsored"/>
Tip: Don’t Confuse Link Attribute & Meta
Robots

72. @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

73. @patrickstox