What Google and SEO Specialists Say About Sponsored Links

This article synthesizes Google's public positions — through its official documentation and statements from its representatives — alongside perspectives from both international and Spanish-speaking SEO specialists on sponsored links. It covers statements and studies available between 2022 and 2026. The goal is not to prescribe a tactic, but to present the actual state of the debate in enough detail for those designing linkbuilding strategies to form their own informed view.

Why the Debate Over Sponsored Links Remains Active

Exchanging money or value for a link is a practice as old as SEO itself. Yet the intensity of the debate has not diminished over the years — it has intensified. Three factors explain why this topic remains relevant in 2026.

The first is the proliferation of publishing platforms that operate explicitly as backlink marketplaces, many of them targeting the Spanish-speaking market. The second is the introduction in 2019 of the rel="sponsored" attribute in the HTML standard, which formalized a category of link that previously had only an informal label. The third — and probably the most relevant — is that Google's core updates from 2022 to 2025 produced ranking shifts that many professionals attributed, at least in part, to the quality of link profiles.

To fully understand the implications of sponsored links, it helps to read this debate alongside the analysis of how Google updates affect a link strategy, which documents the most significant shifts in criteria over recent years.

What Google Says About Sponsored Links

Google Search Central's Official Documentation

Google's position is codified in its spam policies for Search (updated March 2024). The document explicitly lists as a manipulative linking practice "buying or selling links that pass PageRank," including "exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; sending someone a 'free' product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link."

The solution Google proposes is not to eliminate sponsored content, but to signal it correctly: use rel="nofollow" or, preferably, rel="sponsored" to indicate that the link is commercial in nature. With that signaling, the link does not pass PageRank and, according to Google, does not violate its policies.

This point is technical but critical: the distinction between a dofollow link in paid content and one correctly labeled as sponsored determines whether the practice falls within or outside the guidelines. For a detailed explanation of the differences between these attributes, see the article differences between follow, nofollow, sponsored, and UGC links.

John Mueller's Statements

John Mueller, Google's Search Advocate, has addressed the topic on multiple occasions during Google Search Central's public sessions and in threads on X (formerly Twitter). In a Search Central Q&A session from September 2022, Mueller reaffirmed that Google classifies transactional linkbuilding — paid to obtain PageRank — as link spam, regardless of the quality of the content surrounding the link.

Mueller also clarified, in response to questions about native advertising, that the issue is not the payment itself, but the intent to transfer ranking authority. If the link is correctly labeled with rel="sponsored" or nofollow, Google does not treat it as a ranking signal and therefore does not penalize it.

"The issue isn't the money changing hands, it's whether the link is designed to manipulate our ranking systems. If the link is properly labeled, that's not something we have a problem with."

Gary Illyes and the Scale of Enforcement

Gary Illyes, Google's Trends Analyst, has been more measured in his statements. In a 2023 appearance on the "Search Off the Record" podcast, Illyes noted that Google's systems are designed to detect patterns of paid links at scale, but acknowledged that individual-level detection is more complex. This observation generated divergent interpretations: some read it as an acknowledgment that low-volume paid links might go undetected; others interpreted it as a warning about cumulative risk.

What Quantitative Studies Say

Backlinko's Ranking Factors Study

The Backlinko ranking factors study published in 2023, which analyzed more than 11 million search results, found a significant correlation between the number of unique referring domains and Google rankings. The study does not differentiate between paid and organic links — which would be methodologically impossible from the outside — but establishes that the diversity of inbound domains remains one of the strongest correlates of ranking.

This finding is relevant to the sponsored links debate because it suggests that, regardless of their origin, links that Google does not detect as purchased continue to influence rankings. The question the study does not — and cannot — answer is what proportion of those links in top-ranking results are paid in origin.

Ahrefs' Link Building Survey

Ahrefs published in 2024 the results of a survey of more than 400 SEO professionals on their linkbuilding practices. According to the report, 65% of respondents stated they had used some form of value exchange (money, services, or products) to obtain backlinks in the past 12 months. Of that group, 43% said they did not label those links as sponsored or nofollow.

The Ahrefs data does not allow conclusions to be drawn about the ranking impact of those practices, but it does illustrate the gap between Google's policy and actual industry practice.

Semrush's Analysis of Manual Penalties

A Semrush analysis of more than 800 sites that received manual actions related to link spam between 2022 and 2024 identified as a common factor the presence of link profiles with over-optimized anchor text and a concentration of referring domains from sites with low topical authority. The analysis, available on the Semrush blog, does not attribute the penalties exclusively to paid links, but does note that the typical patterns of mass, paid linkbuilding campaigns tend to align with the factors that were penalized.

What Industry Specialists Say

International Perspectives

Marie Haynes, known for her analysis of Google's algorithmic penalties, has argued in her newsletter and blog that recent core updates incorporate content quality signals that interact with link profiles. According to Haynes, a site with questionable backlinks but high-utility content can recover rankings after an update, while the inverse — a strong link profile paired with weak content — appears to be penalized more than before. This observation, published in her analysis of the March 2024 core update, suggests that the balance between content and links is being recalibrated.

Lily Ray, SEO Director at Amsive, has noted at SMX and Brighton SEO presentations that Google's detection of paid links has improved substantially through the use of machine learning. Ray warns that schemes that operated with relative impunity through 2021 are today considerably riskier, particularly when they involve networks of sites with similar publishing patterns.

Kevin Indig, who has analyzed SEO for globally scaled companies, published in his Growth Memo newsletter a reflection on the practical dilemma: competitors using paid links without proper labeling can gain short-term ranking advantages, creating pressure on SEO teams operating within the guidelines. Indig does not recommend violating Google's policies, but describes the problem as a market externality that Google has not fully resolved.

Voices from the Spanish-Speaking World

In the Spanish-speaking market, the debate over sponsored links has its own nuances. Several industry figures — whose work can be found in SEO specialists in Spanish with the highest visibility in the industry — have approached the topic from a more pragmatic perspective than their English-speaking counterparts.

Discussion in Spanish-speaking communities and events tends to focus less on the ethical dimension of the debate and more on risk management. The dominant question is not "are paid links acceptable?" but rather "what scale and what practices push risk to unacceptable levels?" This pragmatism is partly a response to market reality: in many sectors of the digital ecosystem across LATAM and Spain, linkbuilding with value exchange is a normalized practice, and denying it is not operationally useful.

Points of Agreement Across Sources

Despite the diversity of perspectives, there are several points on which Google, the studies, and the specialists agree:

• The rel="sponsored" attribute exists for a specific purpose: to signal that a link is commercial in nature without necessarily violating Google's policies, since it removes PageRank transfer.
• Scale-based patterns are the greatest risk factor: both Semrush's data and statements from Mueller and Illyes converge on the point that Google's detection is most effective against high-volume, low-diversity schemes.
• The quality of the publishing site matters: all available quantitative studies support that the DR/DA of the referring domain and its topical relevance are signals Google continues to process, regardless of the nature of the link.
• Risk does not disappear over time: unlike other gray-hat tactics that lose relevance once discontinued, paid links without proper labeling can become part of a retroactive manual action if the site's profile is reviewed.

Points of Disagreement

The debate becomes more interesting — and more useful for decision-makers — when examining the points where sources diverge.

How Much Has Google's Detection Actually Improved?

Google claims, through its spokespeople, that its link spam detection systems have improved significantly. Yet Ahrefs' survey data shows that a majority of professionals continue using paid links without proper labeling and do not report systematic consequences. This can be explained in three ways: that Google detects but does not act immediately, that many sites operate below the detection threshold, or that the improvement in detection is real but still incomplete. The sources do not converge on which of these explanations is predominant.

Is rel="sponsored" a Sufficient Guarantee?

Google maintains that a link correctly labeled as sponsored does not violate its policies. But some specialists, such as Haynes, have documented cases where sites publishing sponsored content with correct labeling experienced drops after core updates that appeared related to the nature of the content itself, not the link. The hypothesis is that Google can penalize not the link in