Google released information about their new link attributes recently and is urging webmasters to use their recommendations.
One of this is the use of Rel Sponsored for paid and sponsored links. Will using Rel Sponsored still allow link juice to flow or does it stop it? This test checks that out.
Note:
Clint was not able to share his screen, so it’s just audio until halfway of the test.
Transcription Below
If you don't know where this is coming from, Google changed back in – I want to say August-ish time frame, they switched the definition. It used to be just nofollow. If you paid for your link or it was a blog comments or you just didn't want to send links out to anyone you just turn your whole site to external nofollow. The idea that they told everyone was that those links would not be indexed, they don't pass link juice.
Now, there's some, including me, who theorize that Google is actually ignoring nofollow and it was passing some sort of signal through it and saying hey, this is worthwhile to have, or it's not worthwhile to have.
So, there's nofollow. Now, there's a sponsored and user-generated content. The application is nofollow, as Google reports it, they're pretty much switching it over. So it's a hint now. Officially, the hint. I think it was always a hint but now they're just considering it a hint. So you can do nofollow if you want.
If you have a really good site and all of your stuff are nofollow, and then you link out to someone they will probably going to count it as a backlink. YouTube is a good example. Drop your links into YouTube discussion bar or description and you can actually rank websites off of that.
A pro tip. If you do create your video, make it live and then go in with a separate account or your own personal account and drop your link in the first comment and then, I believe you can still pin this, but that comment link is actually a dofollow link. So you can leverage that information and you can rank with it as well. But I was always doing really good on just using the description. I wouldn't have to go beyond that.
Now, there's sponsored. If you paid links or you're hosting links or ads on your website or someone paid you for links and you want to "Do the right thing". You put rel="sponsored" on there and Google knows that those are paid or advertisement links.
Then, the user generated content part is, if you want to denote, like your blog comments or if you have a forum and forum posts are all tagged with user-generated content, which is another way in my opinion, for Google to get you to a z as the web developers as the SEO is put their own thing.
It's a good way if it's implemented it across, let's say, the WordPress, which is a famous spammed comment platform to legitimately ignore those now. They say they are ignoring them now but we have test results showing us that they are not. But now, if everyone's marked with UGC, they can say we're not going to – well, great benefit from UGC. So that leads into the test here.
James tested rel="sponsored". That was a long read. In there, and you just see the implementation of it. It's really that simple to put rel="sponsored" in your href tag and then go to town. He built some links to these sites.
This was the site that is linking out to test page. That's good because if you are... You definitely wouldn't have seen anything if it was a brand new site with no backlinks. Probably wouldn't move anything. In this case, it didn't move the rel="sponsored" pretty much anywhere. Dropped here and then it dropped all the way to the bottom.
Now, I'm not entirely sure if what we're seeing here is definitive proof that sponsored is being followed or not because of the things that are going on right now. I'm sure James would agree with the indexing being screwed up. How much the index is?
How much of the crawlers actually got to see links? How many ~ those links that the crawlers say were worthy that's gone into the index and then how long is that period of time between the time that you place the links to the time the site got credit? Do ~ linking to got credit and then the time between that getting credit and then the passing on to your website. This might be another one of those tests that you stake in the "let it stew" box and come back in a month and see where that's sitting at.
Just to see if the link juice passes through. But still, to me, if this stays consistently right here or right here at the test, doesn't go up to #1 I think that would be a really good indication that they're using rel="sponsored" for what they intended it to be. Paid links that don't send credit, but you can put them on your site and monetize your website and you're just telling them, telling us that it's paid. That seems to me that would be the proper application of that.