Google’s policies cover money, goods, products, and services exchanged for links. That catches product reviews, sponsorships, and affiliate arrangements most publishers never think of as paid — and the fix in every case is one attribute applied honestly.
Most publishers who would never sell a link have made several link-for-value transactions without registering them as such. A free product sent for review. A newsletter sponsorship that included a link. An affiliate arrangement from three years ago that nobody attributed. Each is legitimate, each falls inside the policy, and each has a fix that takes minutes once you know it applies.
The three attributes, and what each is for
Google split the original nofollow attribute into three in 2019, and the distinction matters most on links leaving your own site.
rel="sponsored" — value was exchanged. Payment, advertising, sponsorship, affiliate.
rel="ugc" — a visitor placed it rather than you. Comments, forum posts, submissions.
rel="nofollow" — the general case. You have not vetted the destination or do not wish to endorse it. They combine, and
rel="sponsored nofollow" is common on affiliate links where the publisher wants no ambiguity. The mechanics of each attribute, and what they mean for links pointing at you, are covered in the what is a nofollow link guide. This article is about the other direction: which attribute your own outbound links need, and when.
What counts as paid, including the cases that do not feel like it
The policy language covers money, goods, products, and services. That is broader than most publishers assume.
Cash for a placement. Obvious.
Free product for a review. A service-for-link transaction. Extremely common in reviews, gifting, and PR outreach, and Google’s guidance is that links in this arrangement should carry the sponsored attribute.
Affiliate links. Should be sponsored. On most sites more than three years old, a large share are not — usually because the content predates the attribute existing.
Sponsorships. Event, podcast, newsletter, and community sponsorships that include a link. The sponsorship is entirely legitimate; the link needs attribution.
Discounted or free access in exchange for coverage. Same category as a free product.
Exchange arrangements. A genuine editorial exchange between two relevant sites is not a payment. What does fall inside the policy is any arrangement where money moves in either direction, including through a platform or intermediary. That distinction is covered in the monetise website authority guide, and it is worth being clear about which side of it any arrangement you run sits on.
What does not count: a link you placed because the destination was genuinely useful, with no arrangement of any kind behind it. That is an editorial link and it should stay plain.
Internal links never count. Links between your own pages carry no attribution requirement at all — there is no transaction, no third party, and nothing to disclose. Descriptive anchors on internal links are simply good practice, and the over-optimisation caution that applies externally does not apply here. Which makes internal linking the one part of your link profile with no compliance question attached, and the part most sites have never worked on. Linkexchange covers both halves: the exchange side, where placements are editorial trades between relevant sites rather than transactions requiring attribution, and the free internal linking tools — orphan pages, weak pages, broken internal links and 404s, authority flow, money pages, content gaps, and cluster analysis, with bulk fix committing the repairs in one click on the paid tier. The first half needs the judgement described in this article. The second half needs none of it.
The tension nobody in this market states out loud
Here is the part that explains why unattributed paid links are so common. A paid link marked sponsored is fully compliant. It also passes no ranking credit, which is the entire thing the buyer is paying for.
The attribute that makes the transaction legitimate is the attribute that makes it worthless to the buyer. That is not a loophole anyone has found a way around. It means every paid link arrangement resolves one of three ways: the link is attributed and the buyer is paying for traffic and brand exposure rather than authority, the link is unattributed and both parties are in violation, or no transaction happens. Publishers who understand this price accordingly. Buyers who understand it stop expecting ranking value from correctly attributed placements. Most of the friction in this market comes from one side not having thought it through.
The same question, from the receiving end
If you are on the other side — acquiring links rather than placing them — the attribution question decides what you are actually buying.
Ask before you commit, not after. “Will the link be do-follow and in body content?” is a normal question. Vagueness in the answer is informative, and finding out afterwards is finding out too late.
A sponsored link is a traffic buy. That can be a perfectly good purchase — a placement on a site with a real audience sends real visitors and generates a brand mention. Just price it as advertising rather than as authority, because that is what it is.
An unattributed paid link is a shared violation. The publisher is failing to label, you are acquiring a paid link, and both sides are exposed. The asymmetry favours you — you lose one link, they carry the profile — which is exactly why publishers should think harder about it than buyers do.
Verify after placement. Agreement is not implementation. Check the live page, and check again periodically, because attributes get added during site-wide SEO cleanups. A link that was do-follow in March may not be in September, and nobody will tell you. That last point is why monitoring belongs in the cost of a link rather than as an optional extra, which the should I sell links on my site guide covers from the publisher’s side of the same transaction.
Fixing what has accumulated
Most of this is mechanical.
- Pull your outbound linked domains. Any backlink tool has an outgoing links report, most on a free tier for verified sites. The free internal linking analysis in Linkexchange reports it against the live WordPress install, which is faster for this because it also tells you which pages carry them
- Identify affiliate destinations. Affiliate links usually share a URL pattern or a tracking parameter, which makes them findable in bulk
- Bulk-add the attribute. A find-and-replace across your database handles most affiliate links in one pass. Back up first
- Work through review and gifting content manually. These do not share a pattern. Search your own site for the phrases you use when disclosing — “sent us,” “provided by,” “in exchange for” — and check the links in those posts
- Check sponsorship pages and posts. Anything with a sponsor logo or a named partner
- Check comment and submission links. WordPress handles comments by default; verify any plugin that accepts user content
- Leave editorial links alone. Do not sweep everything into nofollow out of caution — that makes your outbound profile look evasive and conserves nothing
The disclosure obligation, which is separate
Worth separating clearly, because publishers conflate them and they are different requirements from different authorities.
The rel attribute is a search engine instruction. It tells crawlers not to treat the link as an endorsement.
Disclosure is a consumer protection requirement. Advertising standards regulators in most jurisdictions require that readers are told when content is sponsored or when links are affiliate — in plain language, near the content, before the reader encounters the link. Satisfying one does not satisfy the other. A correctly attributed affiliate link with no visible disclosure meets Google’s requirement and fails the regulator’s. A clearly disclosed sponsored post with an unattributed do-follow link does the reverse. Do both. Neither is difficult and the failure modes are unrelated.
What actually happens if you do not attribute
Honest accounting rather than a warning.
The common outcome is algorithmic. The links get identified as paid and stop passing credit. Nothing appears in Search Console. From your side, nothing visibly happens — which is precisely why the practice persists.
The less common outcome is a manual action for unnatural outbound links, which does appear in Search Console and requires cleanup plus a reconsideration request.
The commercial outcome is the one that bites first. Partners and buyers check your outbound profile before agreeing to anything. A site with a large volume of unattributed commercial outbound links reads as a placement seller, and that costs you access to the people worth working with. It shows up as an absence rather than a problem, which makes it easy to miss — and it is the same depletion mechanism the link equity value guide describes for placement sales.
Setting a standard going forward
- Attribute at the point of publishing. Adding the attribute when the link goes in takes seconds. Retrofitting two years of content takes an afternoon
- Write down what triggers it. Any link where something of value was received. Money, product, access, service, or a reciprocal commercial arrangement
- Keep a disclosure template so the consumer-protection side is not improvised each time
- Audit quarterly alongside the outbound review. Attribution drifts as content ages and as people who did not set the standard start publishing — the outbound profile report makes it a number you read rather than a sweep you schedule
- Decide the policy before someone offers you money, not in the reply window. This is the same discipline that governs the monthly cap on placements, and for the same reason
The underlying point
Attribution is not a compliance chore separate from the rest of your link strategy. It is the mechanism that keeps the two halves of your profile honest. Your inbound profile is what other sites say about you. Your outbound profile is what you say about others, and unattributed paid links make that statement dishonest in a way that is machine-readable and permanently visible. Fixing it costs an afternoon. Not fixing it degrades the asset every other route to monetising a site depends on.
