Hello and welcome to episode 68 of SEO is not that hard . I'm your host , ed Dawson , the founder of KeywordsPeopleUsecom , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . I'm an affiliate marketer , seo . I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years . I've built sites from the ground up . I've bought sites and sold sites in large exits . I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years .

Today , I'm going to talk about tagging links with relationship values . This story starts back in 2005 , when Google had a problem that they needed to address , and that was that they wanted to penalize sites that were linking to shady websites sort of spam websites but they didn't want to penalize sites which had lots of user-generated content , such as forums and blogs with comments and things like that . They didn't want to penalize those sites for allowing they used this from linking , didn't want to stop them from linking , but they wanted to be able to protect those sites . So they created a relationship tag called REL , which most people like as REL . So it's a relationship and it's a tag that you can apply to outbound links from your website . Now they invented the nofollow attribute so you could tag a link as nofollow . This would mean that you were essentially disavowing that link . You were saying we do not vouch for this link , we don't want to pass page rank through this link , we're not responsible for the content on this and we're not endorsing this site . This is a way where forums and those kinds of sites with these generated content could allow their users to still keep posting links and still keep showing things online , but without risking the site sending the link from getting penalized . In addition , google also decided at the same time to use this new nofollow tag to say to people if you are selling links sorry it's whether for sponsored purposes or for affiliate purposes or anything like that if there's any kind of exchange of value for placing a link , then they also wanted you to use this nofollow attribute . This means that they could remove from the link graph any kind of sponsored or paid for links in any kind of way and also would protect publishers from their users linking out to dodgy sites that might cause people the publishers of those sites problems .

With this nofollow attribute , they were basically trying to remove problem links from the link graph . These links wouldn't pass page rank anymore . These links wouldn't be followed by Googlebot , their crawlers , when they're crawling the web . Essentially , these links would be removed for the purposes of ranking . The effect of this was basically that people now started referring to links as either followed or nofollowed . Some people would say follow or dofollow . Now there is actually nofollow or dofollow attribute that you put on a link . If you just create a regular link , as is done in HTML , with no rel equals attribute to it , then that is essentially a normal followed link . If anyone ever refers to follow or dofollow , they just mean a link with no rel attribute . Now , this worked really well We've got a good portion of time for many years in fact and it solved lots of problems for Google . But as time went on , more and more sites started being so incredibly cautious and essentially nofollowing all their external links . These were big sites like Wikipedia , the BBC , lots of news websites . Google started to realise , I think , that they were missing out on big portions of the link graph that might actually be useful to them .

In 2019 , they announced some changes and they actually extended the attributes that you could put in against a link . You didn't now just have nofollow . They added two new ones called sponsored , which was for paid and sponsored links . This is where you could explicitly state that a link was sponsored and paid for and there was some value there . You're not going to get in any trouble for doing this as a link as a link and saying that it's sponsored , because that's fine . You kind of like putting your hands up and then Google can decide what to do with it .

The other one was a UGC attribute . That's where you could use it for user-generated content . You run a forum and you allowed your forum users to put links in their posts . You would then like all those links as being UGC . Google can look at those links and say well , the site itself isn't vouching for these , but the individual users are . Their algorithms could then decide whether they wanted to attribute anything , any value , to those links . It's just a way of giving extra classifiers to Google for all the links so it could understand each link type more .

They also changed in March 2020 how these links would now be treated , because previously , if you had a nofollow link , it wouldn't be used for crawling or indexing and it wouldn't be used for ranking . Essentially , google ignored these links completely . But now , since March 2020 , they now have decided that they will take these links , which have got these attributes against them , as hints for crawling and indexing and they may be used as a hint for ranking . Essentially , what they're saying here is that now they're not necessarily going to completely ignore these links . They may decide to use them . This is quite tricky if you're trying to work out for yourself what the value of a link is , because they're saying that they might actually use a nofollow to crawl , they might use it to pass value , pay drunk value from one site to another . It does make it a little more tricky to try and work out the value of links .

Now , clearly , a link which is just a followed link , you know , with no attributes against it , is still going to pass value , still going to pass paid rank and you know , and it's , that's a great link still . But it means that still some of these other links sponsored , ugc and nofollow might pass some kind of value . Now , I suspect sponsored won't pass any value . I think Google will probably treat them as you know , this is a paid for link there is , so we're not going to attribute any value to these UGC . They may pass some value , but I think it might depend on the kind of site that UGC link is from and also , potentially , who the user is on that site . If they see a user on a site who's got lots of value and providing lots of good content , then they may decide that links from certain users on forums might pass value .

Now , that's just me speculating . I've got no evidence on that and it may be completely untrue , but I can see with that tag they could at least , if they wanted to , they could start to do things like that and then nofollow they . Now you know again the hint , this , the hint thing here they may or may not decide to use anything with that . It's a little bit harder with just with a straight nofollow , because it's not really they've not been really given any extra clues to why it's been nofollowed , because there's still lots of sites that aren't using these new sponsored and UGC attributes . They'll just purely be still using nofollow overall . So it's going to be harder for Google to see what the kind of relationship for that link being put there is .

Now , if you've not heard of the new , relatively new tags like sponsored and UGC and you've only been using nofollow , then don't worry , because Google have explicitly stated that while sponsored and UGC will be nice if people use them , they still find to use nofollow in both those cases . If you see , if you've got paid or sponsored links , then it's fine to use nofollow for them . Again , same with UGC it's fine to use nofollow with that . And on any sites of mine where we've got , say , any affiliate links , we just nofollow them . We've always done that since back , probably back , far back 2005 . But we yeah , we nofollow those . We've carried on nofollowing those . We haven't moved those to being sponsored .

Now there is some additional attributes that you can . You can do with this , because obviously I've just talked about the UGC , sponsored and nofollow . You can actually put more than one attribute against the link so you can actually say this is sponsored nofollow . You can say this is UGC nofollow . So you can actually add , you can sort of add more to the description than just one single tag , and there's a reason why you might want to do this . For example , with UGC , what happens if you've got a , a user , on your forum and they put an affiliate link in one of their posts ? Now that is obviously a paid link . That person who's placed that link is potentially going to benefit from it . So if you've just got UGC , then Google state that UGC isn't enough just to prevent a link being considered paid so you could put UGC nofollow . In that case you're saying that on your links . These are UGC links , so this is coming from a user generated content and not from the site owner . And we also want to nofollow it because we don't know what the site they're linking to and what the relationship with the site they're linking to is , so you can actually expand it out . And that would cover you in more than one way against any potential penalty or any kind of potential issues with Google .

So back to the original question to follow or not to follow , what should you do with your links ? Well , if you're linking genuinely , with no payment , nothing in reward , to another website or another URL , another website , then I would just follow it . And that is say , for example , you're writing a piece on marketing tools and you want to link to a tool that you recommend that you use . You've got no relationship , you're not getting paid for it , you just want to give a genuine recommendation because you think it's a good tool . Then you know , have that as a followed link , so you're not going to put any attributes against it at all .

Now say you've been approached by a website and they want you to link to them because they want traffic off you . They want a sponsored link , then I would put a no follow or a sponsored against it . Personally , I'd put a no follow because that's what I've always done . The same with any kind of affiliate link put a no follow against it . It's just not worth getting any kind of penalty for selling links . You just want to keep it straight as a no follow .

If I had any kind of forum or comment section or anywhere where I allowed people to post links on the site that were out of my control , any kind of user generated content I would definitely use the UGC link , this or the UGC attribute and I would probably also put the no follow against it . So a UGC space , no follow attribute . So I'm basically letting Google know that this link was created by a user on the site . So we're not endorsing that and also we don't want you to follow it because we don't want any risk of being penalized . If that person is putting a link that is essentially a paid link , and yeah , and then any other link that you would , if you weren't sure about just no follow it . But I wouldn't no follow all my links , like some sites do . Like some sites have big sites especially have editorial policies where they just no follow all external links . If I was genuinely wanted to recommend a site , as I said at the start , I would definitely not put any attributes against it so as a follow link and actually pass that recommendation and that page rank to that site because I think they deserve it . And you know , if I'm doing it off my own back with no , you know , no coercion , no payment , then why not ? I think it's a good thing to do .

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