Google Says Rel Sponsored Not Needed For Internal Links To Affiliate Product Reviews

You do not need to nofollow or use a rel sponsored attribute on your internal links, even if those internal links lead to sponsored reviews content with affiliate links to those products.

Lily Ray asked Google’s John Mueller about this and John said while half away, the link attributes are not needed, on Twitter.

Lily asked “If you have pages on your site that offer a sponsored review of a brand/product w/ affiliate links (and that’s the entire purpose of the page), should internal links to those pages contain any attributes (rel=sponsored, etc.)?”

John responded “Nah, within the site is not really an issue, since you’re just linking from one part of your site to the other part.” He did add “I will try not to think about this when I’m not fully awake though. How recursive is a sponsored link?”

Here are those tweets:

Nah, within the site is not really an issue, since you’re just linking from one part of your site to the other part.

I will try not to think about this when I’m not fully awake though. How recursive is a sponsored link? o_O

— 🐄 John 🐄 (@JohnMu) January 4, 2022

Honestly, I never thought to even nofollow or rel sponsored the links to internal content that contain affiliate links within them. Sure, add them to the outbound affiliate links but the links to the pages on your site with affiliate links on them seems like a ‘double fence’ that might not be needed here.

So this question and answer was new to me.

Forum discussion at Twitter.