Add rel=”sponsored” to All Links at Once in WordPress – 2021

Google has come up with a Link Spam Algorithm update which has started rolling on 26th July 2021 night, and within two weeks the roll would be completed.

Google has been rolling out various updates over the years when it decided to offer more value to the users. So that users can have a good experience in finding the perfect solution for the queries they perform on Google. Because in the early years, those who built a lot of links ranked even without valued content. And those who have great content yet no links, couldn’t rank. This way, users were not getting the exact results of their queries at times. Thus, Google is making everything possible to rank the sites with good content, good links that are natural. They are making sure that no sites could rank that have some methods to manipulate Search Rankings such as link buying, and selling.

Google wants to mark the relations in each of the outbound links you give out from your site whether it is affiliate links, paid links, or even links from guest posts. This will help Google understand the type of links so that it can whether include or exclude links for ranking a particular page.

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Google’s Recommendation for Link Types

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• Affiliate links: Google recommends sites that are participating in affiliate programs to add rel=”sponsored”. No matter if you have added rel=”nofollow” you still need to add rel=”sponsored”.

Example: <a hrefs=”https://amzn.to/3zaTtYi”  rel=”sponsored”>text</a>

• Links from sponsored posts: Links that are Paid ones (Generally called sponsored links) are to be marked up with the rel=“sponsored” value. Same in this case as well; even if you have added rel=”nofollow” you still need to add rel=”sponsored”.

Example: <a hrefs=”https://example.com/example.php”  rel=”sponsored”>text</a>

• Links from guest posts: Links from guest posts are to be marked up with the rel=”nofollow” value.

<a hrefs=”https://example.com/example.php”  rel=”nofollow”>text</a>

To make you understand that when you will add rel=”sponsored” Google will not consider that link for ranking any page, and the same with rel=”nofollow” which you know already.But, they are considering nofollow tag and sponsored tags a little differently now. That is the reason, they want us to qualify the relations of each external link we add.

If your site fails to qualify the relations between two links/two domains while linking out, your site may get either a manual penalty or may get a ranking drop. So, be careful.

How to Add rel=”Sponsored” to All Links at Once

If you are having a site that generally has affiliate links and you already have made links nofollow or even if you haven’t added any such tags, then it is high time to add rel sponsored to each link.

If your site is big, it is tough to add rel=sponsored to each. So, I have an idea that can work well.

Here are the steps to add rel=”sponsored” to all links at once

1. Install the plugin External Links – nofollow, noopener & new window
2. Activate it.
3. Go here in your Site’s WordPress dashboard. Click that.
   
   
4. Now, you will see the main page of the plugin within your site. Click “External links”
   
   
5. Now, tick the rel=”sponsored” option
   
   

Moreover, there are so many options that you can activate or deactivate as per the requirement. But, since in this post, I am telling you how you can add rel=”sponsored” to all the links, I am just mentioning this.

Now, this will make all the links on your site as rel=”sponsored” along with the tags that you have ticked.  I have ticked all but you can tick the ones you need.

For example, if you tick Noreferrer and sponsored then it will show as

<a href=”example.com” rel=”noreferrer sponosred”>example</a>

Now a case arises that if you have some reference links that you don’t want to add rel=”sponsored” because they aren’t then what?

This plugin added all the external links as rel=”sponsored”. 

For this, go to the Exception tab, and add the URL/domain to this box

Now the link from that domain or particular link will not have rel=”sponsored”.

Again, there are so many options in this plugin, you can do check and use as per your choice.

Hope you like this quick article about adding rel=”sponsored” to all links of your WordPress site.