rel="sponsored"
A link attribute introduced by Google in 2019 to identify links created as part of advertising, sponsorships or other compensation…
Crawling Indexingnofollow
rel="nofollow"
A link attribute telling search engines not to pass ranking credit through a link; since 2019 Google treats it as a hint rather than a directive.
In full
Introduced in 2005 to fight comment spam, nofollow originally blocked both crawling and link equity. In September 2019 Google reclassified nofollow, sponsored and ugc as hints it may choose to use for crawling and indexing purposes. It remains the required disclosure for links you cannot vouch for, and Google's link spam policy expects paid or sponsored links to be qualified with nofollow or sponsored.
Example
A blog appends `rel="nofollow ugc"` to every link inside user comments.
Related terms
rel="ugc"
A link attribute marking links that originate in user-generated content such as comments, forum posts and profile fields.
Link equity
The ranking value passed through a hyperlink, influenced by the linking page's own authority, its relevance, its number of outbound links…
Link spam
Google's spam policy category covering links intended to manipulate rankings: buying or selling links, excessive exchanges, automated link…
Robots meta tag
A `<meta name="robots">` element in the HTML head carrying per-page indexing and serving directives such as noindex, nofollow, nosnippet…