It was Google’s birthday this month. I guess that’s the reason Google has been on a release spree. Throughout this month, Google introduced many new features and 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 September 2019, Google announced that it is evolving the link relationship attribute. NoFollow and DoFollow are the known attributes in the search-engine-friendly sites ecosystem.
Link relationships work as hints to Google. They help Google understand how to treat a link. Google has now 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 submitted by end users. This is a good move, as someday it will reduce the value of a link in comments — we can call it a step against comment spam.
Google is respecting anyone who has started implementing these attributes; the impact might be seen after March 1, 2020.
Here’s how to put it in place before time.
For rel=”sponsored”
If you are running ads based on some ad network, you don’t need to worry about it. If you have some in-content sponsored links, you need to update the code manually.
For rel=”UGC”
If you have any custom user-generated content display, updating links with rel=”UGC” is recommended. If you are using WordPress like me, the comments area is the one that needs to be updated. You can install the plugin WP Add Rel=”UGC” to Comments on your WordPress site. I know this feature should be a part of WordPress core, which is in progress. UGC support will be added to the upcoming WordPress 5.3, scheduled for release on 12th November 2019. Until then you can use the plugin mentioned above.
For beginners who have no idea what the ‘rel’ attribute is in a link tag:
The rel value indicates the relationship of the target link from the website the link is on. There are many existing rel values, such as acquaintance, alternate, bookmark, contact, colleague, copyrights, and many more. You can find more about it on the Microformats Official Documents.