Links you didn’t earn can be switched off

On 26 July 2021, in a blog post titled as a reminder on qualifying links, Google announced what it called the link spam update, an algorithm change it said would roll out over about two weeks and be more effective at identifying and nullifying link spam more broadly, across multiple languages. The rollout took longer than the fortnight implied: Google noted on 9 August that it was not yet done, and confirmed it complete around 24 August, so the change everyone began reacting to in late July only fully settled at the end of the month. The substance is a continuation of a fight Google has been waging for two decades, the lineage running back through the Penguin updates to the original effort to stop manipulated links from deciding rankings. What the update does, in Google’s own framing, is re-assess the links pointing at sites and nullify the ones it identifies as spam — switching off their contribution rather than letting ill-gotten links keep lending rank. The announcement put unusual emphasis on links of a commercial nature: affiliate links, sponsored content, and guest posts, the three most common ways a site monetises and, not coincidentally, the three most common vehicles for links that were paid for rather than earned. None of these are forbidden — Google was explicit that affiliate links, sponsored posts, and guest posts are all fine to use — but it wants them qualified honestly with the right attributes, so its systems can tell a commercial link from a freely given endorsement. The headline for site owners was blunt enough that the forums lit up with it: links you did not earn, and especially links you paid for without disclosing, were about to stop counting.

The single most important thing to understand about this update is the mechanism, because it changes how you should react. Google said it would nullify link spam, and nullify is a precise word: the manipulated links are re-assessed and have their ranking power set to nothing, switched off, rather than the page that received them being demoted as a punishment. That distinction is not pedantry. A system that penalised pages for the links pointing at them would be trivially abusable — you could bury a competitor by aiming spammy links at their site — which is why Google has said for years that it tries to simply discount or ignore links it does not trust rather than holding the receiving site responsible for them. So if this update cost you ground, the honest reading is that links which had been quietly lending you rank were identified and switched off, and the rankings they were propping up settled back to where your earned signals actually place you. That feels like a penalty from the inside, but it is the withdrawal of borrowed strength, not a punitive strike. The asymmetry worth holding is that the punishment risk lives on the other side of your links. The same announcement was clear that sites which publish or acquire commercial links without proper tagging — unqualified affiliate links, campaigns of sponsored or guest posts done purely to pass rank — can face algorithmic actions and even manual actions. So incoming spam tends to be devalued and switched off, while your own outbound commercial links, left unqualified, are the ones that can actually draw a penalty against you. Read correctly, the update asks you to do two different things: stop relying on incoming links you did not earn, because they can vanish, and qualify your outgoing commercial links honestly, because those can be held against you.

The practical compliance question is narrow and answerable: match the rel attribute to the real relationship behind each link. Google has offered, since 2019, a more specific vocabulary than the original rel="nofollow" introduced back in 2005 — adding rel="sponsored" for paid or commercial links and rel="ugc" for user-generated content — and the update is essentially a push to use it where it applies. For affiliate links, the product-review and shopping-guide links that pay a commission, Google asks for rel="sponsored", whether those links were placed by hand or generated dynamically by an affiliate platform; the commercial nature is what matters, not how the link was created. For genuinely paid placements and sponsored articles, rel="sponsored" again, because value changed hands. For guest posts, the guidance is rel="nofollow", since guest posting at scale purely to acquire links is a classic scheme. For links your users place rather than you — comments, forum threads — rel="ugc". And nofollow remains the sensible catch-all when none of the others fit but you still do not want to pass an endorsement. Crucially, Google’s own people defused the panic that this all required a frantic site-wide migration: both Mueller and Illyes said there is no need to rebuild existing nofollow links into sponsored ones, and that simply using the better-fitting attribute on new links is enough. So the work is not a rewrite of your link history; it is a habit going forward — tag commercial links for what they are — plus an audit of any large, obviously unqualified affiliate or sponsored footprint you already have. Get that right and your compliant, honestly-tagged links sit untouched while the manipulative ones around the web lose their power.

Step back from the mechanics and the update makes a single, larger point that outlasts this particular algorithm change: an authority profile built on links you did not earn is a fragile asset, and one built on links you did is not. Every link this update switched off had something in common — it was acquired rather than earned, bought or schemed or traded into existence, which is exactly why it could be identified and nullified at scale. The links it left untouched also had something in common: they were given freely by other sites because the content deserved citing, and there is no footprint to detect in an editorial link offered on the merits. That is the whole case for earned authority stated as a risk position rather than a platitude. Bought links are a liability dressed as an asset; they lend you rank until the update that switches them off, and because they were quick and cheap to acquire, they are quick and cheap for Google to devalue. Earned links are slower and harder to come by — they require content genuinely worth referencing — but that difficulty is the source of their durability, because what cannot be cheaply manufactured cannot be cheaply discounted. The recovery path for a site hit by this update is the same as the prevention path for one that was not: build things worth linking to, earn citations on their merits, and qualify whatever commercial links you place so they never become the liability that draws an action. Rebuilding an authority profile out of earned links takes patience, but it is the only profile that walks through an update like this one unharmed — which is the durable, un-switchable kind of authority the AC Group has helped sites build for 27 years.