When I wrote my new blog posts after updating my plugins, I actually stumbled across something. Yoast has a new option; you can now tell Google if you are using a sponsored link or not. Very handy of course, because now Google knows what to do with your link. But how does this work? And do you need to use the Sponsored Link Yoast SEO option?
Google said in September 2019 that they do not always see nofollow links as a link that they should not follow. So it may just be that the link you put on nofollow is actually just followed by Google. Google’s Danny Sullivan said the following:
Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe the content they point at. Looking at all the links we encounter can also help us better understand unnatural linking patterns. By shifting to a hint model, we no longer lose this important information, while still allowing site owners to indicate that some links shouldn’t be given the weight of a first-party endorsement. – Danny Sullivan, Google
More tips to improve your SEO? Then read these blogs:
- Domain Authority, why is this so important? | The Google Guide
- What is SEO? Improve your traffic with these tips! | The Google Guide
- Improve your domain authority with these tips
Sponsored link Yoast SEO
So now there are actually four different links:
- Normal links
- Nofollow links
- Sponsored links
- User-generated content links
Yoast has ensured that we can easily indicate whether it is a sponsored link or not. You do this as follows:
*The screenshot above is partly in Dutch, because I am using the Dutch version of Yoast SEO.
You select your link and then click on ‘This is a sponsored link or advertisement (Mark as sponsored)’. Because not every search engine knows this tag yet, Yoast also automatically selects the nofollow tag.
This is how your link changes:
Before: <a href="https://www.example.com">your link</a>
After: <a href="https://www.example.com" rel="nofollow sponsored">your link</a>.
Very handy of course! No more trouble with HTML, just download a simple plugin that you need for your blog anyway (see: Must have plugins for bloggers). Because Yoast SEO is actually the number one plugin to fix the SEO of your blog.
Are you going to use this tool?
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