Link rel=sponsored and rel=ugc (rethinking nofollow)

In September 2019, Google announced rel=sponsored and rel=ugc (user generated content) to make the purpose of links clearer and offload rel=nofollow.

Google’s definitions:

rel="sponsored": Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships or other compensation agreements.
rel="ugc": UGC stands for User Generated Content, and the ugc attribute value is recommended for links within user generated content, such as comments and forum posts.
rel="nofollow": Use this attribute for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.

The current HTML Living Standard only includes the latter with the following definition:

The nofollow keyword indicates that the link is not endorsed by the original author or publisher of the page, or that the link to the referenced document was included primarily because of a commercial relationship between people affiliated with the two pages.

I thought I’d open an issue as I couldn’t find one about the two missing relationships and the discrepancy over the meaning of nofollow.

Should the HTML Living Standard adopt the new link relationships?

—and what are the remaining usecases for nofollow if user generated content and sponsored relations are given their own keywords?

The only one I can think of is that web authors want a way to annotate a link as untrustworthy, untrue, misleading, outdated, or otherwise that the destination page is low quality or of questionable origin. Fact-checking websites frequently needs to reference factually inaccurate information. However,nofollow doesn’t mean any of those things. It literally suggest that the reader or user agent shouldn’t follow the link but its really just an annotation for machine readers. Maybe it should be deprecated in favor of unendorsed, warning, nolinkjuice, or something similar with a clearer meaning?

This opens up for new user experiences. If a web author goes out of their way to label a link as bad/low-quality then user agents may want to show a warning before or after following such a link. It would also arguably be more.

debunked would be really useful for fact-checking websites and outdated would be useful in a lot of situations where you need to reference such information (e.g. an outdated software config recipe, two-days-old-and-now-outdated-information-about-an-ongoing-global-pandemic, or a ten year old article about a long-fixed software security vulnerability).

Start with the HTML Living Standard’s link-type-nofollow section and the linked Google announcement about rel="sponsored" and rel="ugc". Review the open questions about adopting those relationships and redefining or replacing nofollow; done would require a resolved standards decision and corresponding specification changes.