What Nofollow, UGC and Sponsored Links Mean to SEO
Nofollow links will still not have any significant effect on ranking factors but will rather be a hint or pointer that will help Google understand better and analyze the other links on your web pages. Nofollow links will be considered when Google bot crawls and indexes web pages.
Sponsored and UGC links, unlike Nofollow links, will have more effect on ranking and penalties. A website can get penalized if it has too many sponsored backlinks. And User Generated links will need to pass through the approval of a webmaster to be considered.
Observe the change
If before now, you have used nofollow links for sponsored links on your website and for user-generated content, you do not have to worry about making changes to them, but henceforth, you are expected to observe the changes and use the new link attributes.
You can use a link attribute together with another – if for instance, you have allowed guest posts on your site, you can add rel=”Nofollow UGC” to the links of the contributed article. You may want to combine rel values for dual purpose links like combining a sponsored attribute with a UGC attribute and it will look like this: rel=”sponsored UGC”.
You may wonder if using these attributes stops the need to highlight ads and sponsored links. Link schemes that are deliberately used to cause a positive effect on page ranking can incur penalties. So you need to avoid being penalized by flagging paid/sponsored links with either the ‘nofollow’ or ‘sponsored’ attribute.
Using Google Search Console, I sometimes see only a 'picture' from my posts listed with a separate URL that I have never intentionally created.
For example https://healthywealthyhappyandwise.com/happiness-can-be-found-in-the-smallest-things/
This link listed in google takes me to my website and shows only the picture and not the whole article.
This is not good for customer experience as they will click away believing that I'm only showing a picture. The URL does not even indicate which of my articles the picture is included in.
When I create my articles, I add pictures using either the WA site content editor or the WP 'New Post' editor. The only information I add is an 'alt tag.'
What am I doing wrong when adding pictures to my articles that make them show in google searches with a separate URL?
And if I cannot prevent this from happening, how can I ensure that the query leads to the complete article instead of just to the one picture?
Any information is appreciated.
Kind regards,
Andrew
Reply
I am getting the images ranked with the url and they do not look nice if someone clicks on them.
If I understand your training correctly, I have to mark the images as nofollow? Do you know if there is a way to change the permalink of these images or I have to delete and upload them again so they do not rank like this. Thank you. Marisa
Should I now do the following - is this correct?
Add rel="nofollow" to link
ADD THIS TO AFFILIATE LINKS IE AMAZON OR CLICKBANK?
Add rel="sponsored" to link
ADD THIS TO GUEST POSTS?
Add rel="UGC" to link
ADD THIS TO... I DON´T GET THIS ONE!
Thanks for your clarification.
Susan
devotedtoanimals.com
Israel Olatunji
As for all your training, this one is very informative. But it also is very confusing (for such a newbie as I am).
For example, you said, "UGC Attribute denotes User Generated Content and it's the attribute for UGC such as forum posts, guest posts, and blog comments". How and where should I place this attribute? It would be really helpful if you provide some examples.
Thank you,
Jane
Israel Olatunji
Israel Olatunji
