UGC Link Attribute

What is UGC Link Attribute?

The UGC link attribute (rel=“UGC”) is an attribute that signals to Google that the link is placed in user-generated content. This attribute was introduced in 2019 when Google changed how the “nofollow” attribute works. At the same time, another link attribute was introduced: “rel=sponsored.”

Both of these were meant to help Google understand better how people are linking across the web. They signal to the search engines that the content was generated by website users and refers to comments, forum posts, or any other places on a website where users can add content. 

Using rel=ugc has not really become a standard or best practice. According to our latest study, less than 1% of all websites were using the UGC attribute.

Is UGC important for SEO?

The UGC attribute doesn’t have a significant impact on a website’s SEO rank. But, it is recommended to use this attribute on any links in the content written by your website visitors. This can include comments, reviews, and other types of user-submitted content. 

Including the UGC attribute in those links helps Google understand why those links were added. It also helps them understand if they should be included in the PageRank calculation. 

In addition to the above, adding the UGC attribute is a good practice to ensure your site doesn’t get penalized for having unnatural external links. This is because comment links are usually spammy links associated with black hat SEO. However, using the “nofollow” attribute on these links is totally fine, too. 

How to find UGC links to a website?

If you want to see the number of UGC links for a particular website, you can use the Backlinks and Referring domains reports in Ahrefs Site Explorer. You can add filters for “UGC” and “sponsored” links when you run either of the two reports. This makes it easy to identify those types of links.

These reports are useful when doing an SEO audit or considering buying a website. It should raise flags if a website has too many links from user-generated content, such as comments.

How to find UGC links on your website

If you want to check your website and see if it’s using the UGC attribute, you can use the free tools by Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Run the crawl and apply the “UGC” filter in the Links Explorer tool. This will show you any links that are using the attribute.