What is the UGC attribute?

UGC stands for user generated content. Google introduced this value on 10 September 2019 together with sponsored, so that a site could describe the origin of its outbound links more precisely than nofollow allowed on its own.

The test is not the quality of the link, nor the trust the destination page deserves, but who placed it there. If the link sits in an area open to third parties, such as comments, forum threads, product reviews or public profiles, ugc is the value that applies.

The line between the three values is sharp. sponsored marks links that exist because something was given in return: money, goods, services or any advertising arrangement. nofollow is the general value, kept for cases where neither of the other two fits and the site would rather not be associated with the linked page or have Google reach it from here.

One point is often misread: marking a link as ugc does not declare it suspicious. A reader may well cite an excellent source in a comment. The value describes where the link came from, not a judgement on its worth.

The value goes inside the rel attribute of the link element. A single link accepts several values separated by spaces or commas, and the most common combination in comments and forums is rel="ugc nofollow". Google documents both separators explicitly.

<li class="comentario">
  <a href="https://ejemplo.com/guia"
     rel="ugc">guía citada</a>
</li>

<a href="https://ejemplo.com/oferta"
   rel="ugc sponsored">oferta</a>

What matters is how Google treats these markings. Since the September 2019 announcement, all three values act as a hint for ranking purposes, not as an instruction. For crawling and indexing, nofollow also became a hint on 1 March 2020.

In practice the site informs and the search engine decides. Links carrying these values are generally not followed, yet the destination page may still be discovered by other routes, such as a sitemap or a link from another domain. The line that still appears in many manuals, that a link with nofollow or ugc is guaranteed to stay out of Google’s calculations, stopped being true in 2019.

The markup does not shift responsibility either. If a link exists because something was given in return, the value Google asks for is sponsored, on its own or alongside ugc when a user published it as well. Buying or selling links for ranking purposes without qualifying them is among the practices Google’s spam policies prohibit.

Any site with open comments, a forum, reviews or user profiles accumulates outbound links its editorial team never chose. The decision that hangs on this attribute is easy to state and easy to postpone: what does the site say about those links? Without markup, the outbound link profile mixes the newsroom’s recommendations with whatever an anonymous visitor pasted in.

For the site receiving the link, the picture differs. A mention in an active thread still brings qualified visitors and, since 2019, is not ruled out as a signal in advance either. Writing off a link because it carries ugc is as sloppy as counting it in full.

The third point carries the greatest risk: when a link grows out of a commercial arrangement, labelling it as user content does not make it one. That decision affects the domain’s standing with the search engine far more than the authority passed by any single link.

• Mark every link generated in areas open to third parties with ugc automatically: comments, forums, reviews, signatures and public profiles.
• Apply sponsored whenever something is given in return, even if a user published the link; rel="ugc sponsored" then describes the full situation.
• Check what your content management system sets by default, because many still add only nofollow in comments.
• Keep human or automated moderation of user content in place; the attribute describes where a link came from and filters no spam.
• If a trusted contributor posts in your community and you stand behind their links editorially, you may deliberately leave them unmarked and record that choice.
• Re-check the markup after every change of template, comment plugin or review system, which is when it usually gets lost.

• Claiming that a link with ugc or nofollow is safely excluded from Google’s evaluation; since September 2019 these values are a hint.
• Using ugc on paid or exchanged links to avoid the sponsored label, which is the one that applies when something is given in return.
• Applying ugc to internal links or to links written by the editorial team, which drains the signal of any meaning.
• Rushing to rewrite every legacy nofollow link, when Google still treats that value as valid and demands no migration.
• Leaving spam control to the attribute while neglecting moderation, captcha or posting limits.