July 2021 link spam update

Both ends of the link

Google stated the update would nullify link spam across several languages and that it affected both sites buying links and sites selling them. A publisher accepting paid guest posts without marking the links was exposed alongside the client who bought them.

That two-sided enforcement is why this update hit a lot of legitimate-looking blogs. A site with good original content that ran an unmarked sponsored post programme was inside scope, and many owners had never thought of themselves as a link seller.

The rel attributes that resolve it

• rel=”sponsored” for paid or compensated links of any kind, including affiliate.
• rel=”ugc” for links in user-generated content such as comments and forum posts.
• rel=”nofollow” as a general signal not to pass credit, still valid and still understood.

Google has treated these as hints rather than directives since 2019, but marking links correctly remains the clearest demonstration of good faith, and the absence of marking on an obviously commercial link is what draws attention.

Why this is a neutralisation, not a penalty

The word Google used was nullify. The links stop passing credit rather than the site being docked. For a site whose rankings depended on those links, the decline is not a punishment to be lifted but a return to what the content earns on its own.

That distinction changes the recovery work completely. Disavowing links that have already been nullified achieves nothing, because they are already not counting. The route back is earning links that do count. The full method is in the backlink audit and disavow guide.

Source: Google ranking updates list