Paid, sponsored or affiliate outbound links are not qualified (SpamBrain)

Google says SpamBrain can detect sites used for the purpose of passing outgoing links, and its spam policies treat selling links that pass ranking credit as link spam. Google documents the rel values that qualify these links.

Add rel="sponsored" to affiliate and paid links and rel="ugc" to user-generated links, ideally in templates and affiliate plugins so it is automatic. Remove links that were sold to pass ranking credit.

1. Crawl the site and export all external outbound links with their rel attributes and source URLs.
2. Filter for known affiliate domains, tracking parameters, redirect paths such as /go/ or /out/, and pages labelled sponsored, partner or advertorial.
3. Flag any of those links without sponsored, ugc or nofollow in rel.
4. Check comment and forum templates for links without rel="ugc" or rel="nofollow".
5. Review Search Console Manual actions for any unnatural outbound links notice.

Written for the SpamBrain and spam detection systems page (evidence: Confirmed).

Direct risk reduction: avoids being treated as a link seller and possible manual or algorithmic action. Estimate only: no ranking gain should be expected from qualifying links.

Google's December 2022 link spam update post (SpamBrain detects sites passing outgoing links), Google's spam policies (link spam), and Google's qualify outbound links documentation.