rel="ugc" attributes on links posted by Newbies (so essentially anyone without any merit points) are already being added since around January, 2021:
Not sure what they're trying to do. In case it is some SEO-motivated thing, I added rel="ugc" to all newbie links. While I was at it, I also added this to all links in signatures.
Thanks to everyone reporting them!
Thanks for letting us know. I didn't inspect link posted by newbie user earlier. Anyway, i did further research and Google say other way to discourage spammer is by adding "noindex robots meta tag"[1]. But it's not practical option since entire page wouldn't be index by google. But on other hand, one of Google documentation mention it's possible to include multiple values inside
rel[2]. Anyway i have following question to people who own website,
Do you think using all possible value (such as
rel="nofollow,noindex,ugc") would further discourage spammer from performing SEO spam?
[1]
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/monitor-debug/prevent-abuse[2]
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/qualify-outbound-links