You will be able to recognise link spam and label paid and user-generated links correctly.
Mei Ling paid a Singapore lifestyle blog to feature her festive cakes in a sponsored post. The post was good: real photos, an honest review, a link to her order page. A month later, a friend who works in marketing asked her a question she could not answer. "Is that link marked as sponsored?"
It sounds like a technical detail. It is the difference between a paid link that follows Google's rules and one that breaks them. This lesson covers which link practices Google's policies prohibit, how to label links that involve money or come from users, and how to spot the offers to avoid.
Lesson 1.4, What gets a site demoted or removed, introduced Google's link spam policy. Here is the detail. Google describes link spam as links intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results. Its examples include buying or selling links that pass ranking credit, which covers paying money for links, exchanging goods or services for links, and sending someone a free product in exchange for a post with a link. It includes excessive link exchanges, where sites agree to link to each other mainly to gain links. It includes using automated programs or services to create links to your site.
The policy also covers less obvious forms: requiring a link as part of a contract or terms of service without letting the site owner mark it, keyword-rich links hidden in widgets or footers distributed across many sites, and low-quality directory or bookmark site links created mainly for ranking.
Notice what the examples share. In each case, the link exists because of a deal or a scheme, rather than because someone chose to recommend the page.
Paying for exposure is normal business. Advertising, sponsorships, paid reviews and influencer posts are all legitimate. Google's concern is with paid links that pass ranking credit as if they were editorial recommendations.
The answer is a link attribute: a small label in the link's code that tells Google how to treat it. Google supports three. The first, rel="sponsored", marks links that are advertisements or paid placements, including sponsored posts, advertorials and influencer content where the creator was paid or given something. The second, rel="ugc", marks links in user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts. The third, rel="nofollow", is the general option for any link you do not want associated with your site or passing ranking credit.
Google says rel="nofollow" is also acceptable for paid links, but rel="sponsored" is preferred because it is more specific. Google treats all three as hints about how to handle the link.
So Mei Ling's sponsored post is fine, as long as the blog marks the link with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". If it does not, the link looks like a bought link passing ranking credit. The fix is a polite message to the blog asking them to add the attribute. Many bloggers do this by default, and most website builders and blogging platforms have a setting for it.
If your own site has a comment section, a forum or a community board, people will post links there. Some will be helpful and many will be spam. Links in user-generated content should carry rel="ugc" or rel="nofollow". Most blogging and forum software adds this automatically to links in comments, but check, especially on an older or custom site.
Moderating comments matters too. Google's spam policies include user-generated spam: spam that visitors add to a site through comments, forum posts or profiles. A comment section full of spam links reflects on your site, whatever attribute they carry.
Most small businesses receive emails offering backlinks. They tend to share some features: a promise of a number of "high-authority" or "high-DA" links, a guarantee of rankings or of a position, a low fixed price and no detail on which sites will link or why. The authority figures they quote usually come from third-party tools, not from Google, as lesson 6.1, Why links still matter, and which ones, explained.
Treat a guaranteed backlink package as a warning sign. Links that can be produced in bulk to order are, almost by definition, links created to manipulate rankings. At best they are worthless. At worst they lead to a demotion by Google's systems or a manual action, and you have to spend time cleaning up links you paid for.
Guest posting deserves a note. Writing a genuinely useful article for a relevant site, with a byline and a natural mention of your business, is reasonable. Google's spam policy targets large-scale article campaigns with keyword-rich anchor text aimed at gaining links, so a guest post that exists mainly to carry a link fits the policy, however it is dressed.
List every paid placement you have, or have had in the past few years: sponsored posts, advertorials, influencer collaborations, paid directory listings, sponsorships that came with a link on the sponsor page. For each, open the page, find the link to your site and check its attribute. In most browsers you can right-click the link and choose "Inspect" to see the code.
Mei Ling found three placements. The lifestyle blog link carried rel="sponsored". A paid directory listing had no attribute at all. An influencer's post linked through a link-in-bio tool, which she noted as unclear. The activity below asks you to run the same check on everything you have paid for and note which links are marked correctly.
Check any sponsored posts, partner pages or directory listings you have paid for and note whether their links are marked correctly.
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