Help google Identify the type of Links on your Website.

It was Google’s birthday this month. Guess that’s the reason why Google is on release spree. Throughout this month, Google introduced many new features. Also discontinued some features in search and associated tools. I’ll write a post on each feature release as possible with impacts as and when shared by people.

For this post let’s talk about Link Relationships.
On 10th Sept 2019, Google Announced, that google is evolving link relationship attribute. NoFollow and DoFollow are the known attributes in Search Engine Friendly Sites ecosystem.

Link Relationship work as Hints to google. It helps google understanding how to treat the link. Now Google announced two new attributes “UGC” & “sponsored”.

rel=”sponsored” is to be used for in-content, adverts or any compensated link.

“UGC” is for User Generated Content. rel=” UGC” is used for links in the Comment section or any content that is submitted by End-user. This is a good move as someday this will reduce the value of a link in comments. we can call it a step towards comments Spam.

Google is respecting anyone who is started implementing these attributes, the impact might be seen after March 1, 2020.

Here’s how to put in place before time.

For rel=”sponsored”
if you are running ads based on some Ad Network, then you don’t need to worry about it. if you are having some in-content sponsored links then you need to Update the Code Manually.

For rel=”UGC”
If you have any custom User-generated Content display, then updating links with rel=”UGC” is recommended. If you are using WordPress like me, then the Comments area is one which needs to be updated. You can install plugins WP Add Rel=”UGC” to Comments to your WordPress site. I know this feature should be a part of WordPress core, which is in process. UGC support will be added to Upcoming WordPress 5.3 which is scheduled to be released on 12th November 2019. Till then you can use the plugin mentioned above.

For Beginners, who have no idea what ‘rel’ attribute is in the Link tag.
rel value indicates the relationship of the target link from the website link is on. There are many existing Rel values. Some are acquaintance, alternate, bookmark, contact, colleague, copyrights and many more. You can find more about it on Microformats Official Documents.