Links & authority rules
Links and brand mentions still decide who is trusted. These rules separate the ones that count from the ones that get a site penalized.
Reviewed Oct 30, 2026 · next review Nov 2, 2026
Rules in force 3 of 42 in the rulebook
High impact 1 fix these first
Official 67% 2 from engine docs
Retired 0 in this area
Impact split
- High impact 1
- Medium impact 2
- Low impact 0
Engines covered
Rules in this area that apply to each engine
- Google 3 of 3
- Bing 3 of 3
- ChatGPT 1 of 3
- Perplexity 1 of 3
- Gemini 1 of 3
- Claude 1 of 3
High impact 1
40 High impact Official
Don't buy, swap or manufacture links to manipulate rankings
Google defines link spam as creating links to or from a site primarily to manipulate rankings, and it runs regular spam updates; there were four in 2026 through September.
Medium impact 2
41 Medium impact Official
Mark paid links rel=sponsored and user-submitted links rel=ugc
Google asks for rel=sponsored on ads and paid placements and rel=ugc on comments and forum posts, with nofollow for other untrusted links.
42 Medium impact Emerging
Keep your brand name, description and facts consistent everywhere you're mentioned
Bing's 2026 guidelines ask for clear, consistent entity names for grounding.