CHOZEN NO FOLLOW EXPLANATION

Qualifying Outbound Links for Google

As a website owner, it's important to provide signals to Google about the nature of the outbound links on your site. By using specific attributes, you can help search engines better understand and categorize these links, which can impact how they are treated for crawling and ranking purposes.

Regular Links

For normal outbound links that you want Google to crawl and index without any special designation, you don't need to add any special attributes. These links will be treated as regular links by default.

Sponsored Links

If you have outbound links that are paid advertisements or sponsored placements, you should mark them with the rel="sponsored" attribute. This attribute tells Google that the link is a paid link, and Google can then handle it according to their policies on sponsored links.

User-Generated Content Links

Links within user-generated content, such as comments or forum posts, should be marked with the rel="ugc" attribute. This informs Google that the link is part of user-generated content, which can be useful information for the search engine's algorithms.

If you have particularly trustworthy contributors who consistently provide high-quality content, you may consider removing the "ugc" attribute from their links over time as a way to reward their contributions.

Nofollowed Links

In cases where you don't want Google to associate your site with the linked page or crawl the linked page from your site, you can use the rel="nofollow" attribute. This is a catchall attribute for links that don't fit into the other categories.

Multiple Attributes

It's possible to combine multiple rel attributes for a single link by separating them with a space or comma. For example, rel="ugc nofollow" would mark a link as both user-generated content and as a link that should not be followed.

Important Notes

These rel attributes serve as guidelines for Google, but they don't guarantee that pages won't be crawled or indexed through other means, such as sitemaps or links from other sites.

To prevent Google from crawling specific pages on your own site, it's better to use the robots.txt disallow rule rather than relying on the nofollow attribute.

If you want to prevent a page from being indexed while still allowing it to be crawled, you can use the noindex robots meta tag.

By properly qualifying your outbound links, you can help Google better understand the context and nature of these links, which can potentially impact how they are treated in search results and other algorithms.