Sponsored links are incoming links to your site purchased via paid advertisements. These promotional links must be tagged with a rel=”sponsored" link attribute. The ”sponsored” attribute tells Google that a site has received some form of compensation for adding the link. Sponsored links do not pass link equity and are similar to nofollow links. Hence, they do not directly improve SEO.
Combining sponsored links with other links is a good link building strategy. Paid links improve branding and bring in more qualified traffic to your website, while editorially-given dofollow backlinks directly improve your SEO. You can check the number of sponsored backlinks to your domain using a tool like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
As a business owner or an SEO marketer, you should build promotional links on sites that are geographically relevant to your business and have good organic traffic. Some forms of websites that you can approach for sponsored link building are product review platforms, industry-leading blogs, and high-traffic domains offering paid external links and sponsored content placements.
Always remember to use the rel= "sponsored" link attribute whenever you acquire paid links via advertorials or sponsored guest posts with keyword-rich or branded anchors. Google introduced sponsored links to understand the nature of external links pointing to any domain. A large number of dofollow paid links to your website (ones without the sponsored link attribute) leads to link spam and can invite Google penalties.
Let’s understand sponsored links in detail, how they work, when to use them, and whether they are really useful in search engine optimization. This article covers it all.
Sponsored links are external links placed on high-traffic and relevant websites that direct visitors from the host domain to the advertiser’s website. They can immediately improve brand recognition and bring in more users.
For example, if you have an SEO company and you publish sponsored content on reputed publications like the Search Engine Land, you can drive an exceptional amount of referral traffic with a high-purchase intent.
Sponsored content with links can remain on the host site for extended periods and continue to send qualified traffic to your website. Hence, sponsored links are great for new user acquisition and branding.
However, paid links do not directly influence SEO. Since promotional links have the rel=”sponsored” link attribute, Google ignores such links in its PageRank calculation. Hence, these backlinks do not pass link juice or increase your domain authority scores.
Also, paid links are not that common. Only 0.01% of websites use the rel=sponsored link attribute.
The HTML code to define a sponsored link contains the hyperlink, the anchor, and the sponsored link attribute.
Here is an example of a sponsored link in HTML:
In this code, href="https://www.yoursite.com" points to your website, and rel="sponsored" tells search engines that the link is part of a paid promotion.
The sponsored link attribute helps search engines distinguish between organic and paid links.
Sponsored links help search engines understand the relationship of links between different domains. They help to distinguish between organic and paid backlinks. Since Google ranking algorithms rely heavily on backlinks, the number and quality of referring domains to a website decide its ranking potential in organic search. When you specify advertised links as sponsored, Google can quickly detect the nature of the backlink and stop the flow of link juice from passing from the host site to the advertiser’s site.
As a website owner, you should add proper sponsored links to all advertised content on your site. Whether you are selling sponsored guest posts, business directory links, affiliate links, sponsored reviews, or any other promotional feature containing backlinks to the advertiser’s website, you should use the rel=”sponsored” links attribute on the links. Using the attribute is necessary because it will help your site remain safe from spam, save your hard-earned link equity, and discourage other users from spamming your website’s content.
From the perspective of search engines, the use of the rel="sponsored" tag is vital. It ensures that paid links do not influence natural search rankings, maintaining the quality of search results. This tagging system allows search engines to clearly distinguish between organic links and those influenced by commercial relationships, thus preventing the manipulation of search rankings and ensuring that users receive the most relevant and unbiased information.
Overall, sponsored links help balance the commercial needs of websites with the operational integrity of search engines, promoting an ethical and transparent digital advertising environment.
Search engines created the sponsored tag to identify between paid links and organic links. Before the introduction of nofollow links in 2005, all external links used to be dofollow.
With nofollow, it became easier for Google to combat link spam. Back in 2005, there was massive comment and forum spam with exact-match anchor links. Web admins had a hard time dealing with spam comments and posts.
Nofollow tags gave them a sigh of relief because they helped web admins easily make comments on their site nofollow, which stopped the flow of link equity from the host site to the commenter's site.
In 2019, Google went a step further and introduced two new tags: sponsored and UGC. Sponsored is used as a hint to identify nofollow links that are used as an advertisement, while UGC is used to identify hyperlinks created by users without any editorial intervention.
You can think of sponsored and UGC as extensions of nofollow. They both serve the same purpose: to stop the flow of link juice.
Sponsored links do not directly help with SEO. This means that they do not influence organic rankings, nor do they improve domain trust scores. However, they indirectly influence SEO metrics.
For instance, when you acquire a sponsored link through a sponsored guest post on a high-traffic site, people learn about your business. When more and more prospects know about your services and business offerings, they start searching for your brand on Google, and the chances of them linking to your website increase.
Hence, as a result of improved brand exposure on highly relevant and popular domains, your organic links count improves steadily, and this helps with SEO.
Moreover, when you acquire lots of relevant traffic via sponsored link building campaigns, users spend more time on your site, leading to improved user engagement metrics like time on page, time on site, CTRs, etc. An increase in user engagement helps SEO since Google and other search engines count user engagement metrics to understand how effective your webpage is for the users.
Also, sponsored links can help you build relationships with other businesses and influencers in your industry. These relationships might lead to natural (non-paid) backlinks in the future, which are highly valuable for SEO.
Sponsored links are completely safe if you follow the search engine guidelines. If you are building sponsored links, you need to make sure those are explicitly marked as “sponsored” using the rel attribute. Failing to do so might invite search engine penalties since Google might count these paid links as a tactic to manipulate search engine rankings.
There are two ways to check a sponsored link on a website. The first method is the easiest one. Simply visit the page containing a sponsored link, point the cursor to the hyperlink, and select Inspect.
Now, check for the sponsored link attribute, which will be written as:
For this method to work, you should know the webpage that contains your sponsored link.
If you wish to search all the sponsored links pointing to your domain, you can do that by using link-checking tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs.
For example, the Ahrefs Site Explorer helps you locate all sponsored links pointing to your website or your competitor’s.
Enter the domain into Site Explorer and run the Backlinks report. Now select Sponsored from the list of available filters. You will see a complete list of sponsored external links leading to the website.
Similarly, you can use the SEMrush backlink analysis tool to find sponsored links to any domain. Enter a domain in the backlink analytics tool and click ‘Analyze’:
Now, click on the Backlinks tab at the top. You will see all the websites linking to your domain. Click on Sponsored to filter the sponsored backlinks.
You should use the sponsored link attribute when linking out to websites that have paid for publishing their content with hyperlinks on your website.
If you are building sponsored links, you should request the web admin to add the rel=sponsored attribute in each of your website hyperlinks.
Some of the instances where you should use the sponsored link attribute are:
To add a sponsored link in WordPress, you can use the "Yoast SEO" plugin. The plugin lets you easily add and manage sponsored links without the need to directly edit the HTML.
Go to your WordPress dashboard and click on Plugins > Add New.
Search for "Yoast SEO,” click "Install Now" next to the plugin, and then click "Activate."
Now, open your WordPress Dashboard, go to Posts or Pages, and select the one where you want to add the link.
Highlight the text you want to use as the anchor for your link and click the Insert/Edit Link icon (the chain symbol) in the editor.
Now, just paste your sponsored link into the window and click "mark as 'sponsored' ” from the advanced section.
Next, press Enter on your keyboard or click on Save, and your sponsored link will be added.
To add a sponsored link in HTML, you should use the rel="sponsored" attribute within an anchor () tag.
Open your HTML document in the code editor of your choice. For instance, if the editor is WordPress, then you can open the post or page where you need to insert the link.
Switch to the block editor. Then, select the text where you want to insert the sponsored link.
Click on three dots and then ‘edit as HTML.’
Now insert the sponsored link by adding the HTML code:
Use the tag to include the sponsored link. Add the rel="sponsored" attribute within the tag. Type the anchor text between the opening and closing tags.
Verify that the anchor tag is closed correctly with to complete the link setup.
Besides sponsored backlinks, there are three other types of backlinks distinguished by the rel attribute in HTML to denote their nature. These are nofollow, dofollow, and the UGC attributes.
All these three attributes, along with the rel=”sponsored” attribute, help SEO professionals manage how search engines view the link structure of their websites, ensuring more accurate and fair link weighting in page rankings.
Let’s understand the different link attributes in detail.
NoFollow links include a rel="nofollow" attribute to tell search engines not to follow the link or pass along any link equity to the linked website. Here is an example:
You can check whether a link is followed or nofollow by placing the cursor over the link, right-clicking it, and selecting "Inspect".
Now, look for the word "nofollow" within the rel attribute.
Unfollowed links are used to prevent the transfer of ranking power from one site to another. They are added to external links where there is no editorial endorsement of the linked website.
NoFollow attribute should be used for links that are not editorially-given. When you add nofollow to content sections on your site where users can easily sign up and create content, like blogs or comments, you can drastically reduce webspam. The Nofollow attribute makes it less attractive for spammers to post irrelevant links since these will not offer SEO benefits.
NoFollow links do not pass link equity, which is similar to sponsored links. You should use nofollow to prevent the passage of SEO credit for a variety of reasons, including non-endorsement or irrelevance to the content. On the contrary, the sponsored attribute should only be used for outbound links that involve monetary compensation, explicitly indicating that a link is part of a commercial deal.
The user-generated content attribute specifically labels links that appear within user-generated content, such as, comments and forum posts, differentiating them from editorially placed links.
Below is an example of a UGC link attribute:
These links tell search engines that the link has been created by users rather than the website's administrators or content creators. This attribute was introduced to help search engines distinguish between organically created editorial links and those generated within user-contributed content, which may not be as reliable or trustworthy.
UGC links enhance the authenticity and richness of your site's content. However, they have no direct impact on SEO. You can find the number of UGC links to a domain using the Ahrefs Site Explorer.
The major difference between UGC and sponsored links is that UGC links are specifically for content that is generated by users and may not necessarily reflect the site owner's endorsements. On the other hand, sponsored links are used for commercial relationships where the site owner receives compensation for the link.
Dofollow is the commonest link attribute, which is not explicitly added in HTML but is implied when no other rel attribute is present. By default, any link without a rel attribute (like nofollow, sponsored, or UGC) is considered a dofollow link.
You can check the number of dollow links to any domain using a tool like SEMrush. Go to the “Backlinks” tab and click the “Follow” filter in the “Backlinks” section.
Follow inbound external links allows search engines to follow them and pass on link equity to the linked website. Followed links directly boost SEO by passing on link equity. The earned link power can increase the search engine rankings of the website receiving the link.
You should not use the nofollow, UGC, or sponsored attribute when you want to endorse another website and believe it's beneficial for your users to visit.
DoFollow links are used for editorial linking based on content merit and relevance, whereas links with a sponsored attribute are explicitly used for links that have been paid for as part of advertisements or sponsorships.
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Our link building strategies and best practices ensure that your links are editorially placed and follow Google’s guidelines.
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