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…
Crawling IndexingUser-generated content link attribute
rel="ugc"
A link attribute marking links that originate in user-generated content such as comments, forum posts and profile fields.
In full
rel=ugc lets a site distinguish links its editorial team created from links its users created, without applying blanket nofollow to everything. Google treats it as a hint alongside nofollow and sponsored. Sites with large UGC surfaces are still expected to police spam actively; the attribute alone does not exempt a host from user-generated spam enforcement.
Example
A community platform outputs `rel="ugc"` on links in forum replies but plain follow links in staff-written knowledge base articles.
Related terms
rel="sponsored"
A link attribute introduced by Google in 2019 to identify links created as part of advertising, sponsorships or other compensation…
Link spam
Google's spam policy category covering links intended to manipulate rankings: buying or selling links, excessive exchanges, automated link…
Site reputation abuse
Publishing third-party content on a host site to exploit that site's ranking signals; a Google spam policy violation regardless of…
Robots meta tag
A `<meta name="robots">` element in the HTML head carrying per-page indexing and serving directives such as noindex, nofollow, nosnippet…