When Google announced the new link spam update, a ton of confusion arose with that announcement. The confusion was mostly around do you need to change your nofollow links to rel=sponsored for affiliate or similar links. The answer is no, nofollow is fine and you won’t get in trouble for using nofollow instead of rel sponsored.

While Google has said in the past that it prefers you to use rel sponsored for affiliate links – you do not need to. The nofollow link attribute changes specifically say a nofollow attribute works fine for Google’s purposes, but you would be doing the company a favor to use rel sponsored and rel ugc in those areas when applicable.

Both Gary Illyes and John Mueller of Google recently confirmed this on Twitter with these tweets:

So don’t stress it…

Forum discussion at Twitter.