Google’s New Link Building Guidelines for 2020

Google has just changed up the link building guidelines.

When you state about backlinks, the thought that quickly strikes is no-follow links & do-follow links that point to your site.

One of the most prominent ways to produce back links is guest posts. However, there are very fewer efforts taken to craft content that can actually be submitted organically & approved. Paying to get guest posts included are gaining traction. Even if you do so, they should be no-follow as per Google. Tactics like disbursing to get your articles featured is a big no-no because they manipulate rankings. Doing so can penalize your site or altogether ban it from Google.

But Google isn’t Dumb!

We know in SEO that the more the do-follow links, the better the rankings will be. Buying or paying for links can easily be detected by the search engine now.

There are many terms used to segregate a paid post like “guest contributor” or maybe “former contributor”. If not, just there are other gauges that Google uses, like the URL structure.

Diverse other indications that help the Googlebot is probably not unveiled by Google that determines if a link is naturally earned or paid for. If Google does not want to count a link from a specific author, they can just ignore it on their end.

So, whether no-followed or do-followed, Google has the control of whether a link should help your rankings or if it shouldn’t.

The New Link Attributes

The link attributes which are recently been introduced that will affect SEOs are — sponsored, UGC and no-follow. These shall now help google to consider which links must be included or excluded within Search. The below changes shall move into effect on March 1, 2020.

Here is what you should know –

The link should be marked as “sponsored” if someone pays you for a link or you are buying a link.For that you must use the below link attribute:
rel= “sponsored”
If the link building is done through user-generated content, the links must be marked with the below attribute:
rel= “ugc”
For site owners say for instance if you have a forum on your site, the links that people place should contain the link attribute as –
rel= “ugc”
The “no follow” attribute can still be used. However, if you want you can use a combination of the above if you have a paid link, you can use the below attribute
rel= “nofollow sponsored”

Google has just changed up the rules for link building. It used to be that when people link to you, the link would either be a do-follow link or a no-follow link. Well, that’s now changed. They are now introducing 2 more link types that will affect SEOs. Before this Google introduced a brand-new set of rules in September 2019 that could identify spam links which were really useful for marketers. The current SEO landscape is simple. Especially when it comes to link building it is very easy and friendly.

The more do follow (regular links) links you can get the better your search rankings.

Conclusion

The above attributes will only help Google to tighten things up and make things more precise.

Along with the already defined signals, these will be more helpful signs to regulate if the URL linked to should be potentially crawled or ignored.

Hence, what all we can do is to continue the ethical SEO practice of fashioning amazing user experience, structuring prodigious product/services, making user-oriented content and everything else that your opposition isn’t doing.

What are your thoughts about the new link building guidelines? Will they be truly betting? Do let us know. Our experts at Mindstorm – digital marketing agency are a creative bunch of people, excellent at adding fun to your brand.