How is Taboola following Google’s Sponsored Content Policies? – Taboola Publisher Help Center

Sponsored content and advertising are a natural part of the web’s economy. But they should be properly designated as such to both users and to search engines. Taboola’s ads are following Google’s and most search engines sponsored content guidelines in several ways.

How?

Taboola properly labels all sponsored content on the page as sponsored content
Taboola properly marks all sponsored links on its products with the relevant rel=”nofollow” and rel=”sponsored” attributes
Taboola passes all sponsored content and links through an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file directive

Taboola properly labels all sponsored content on the page as sponsored
Google states that in order to comply with its guidelines, sponsored content should be “properly disclosed to users”.

In addition to preventing the crawling and passing of PageRank of sponsored links for search engine purposes, Taboola’s Content Policy enforces proper disclosure of all advertisements on page to be clearly visible to users.

Taboola properly marks all sponsored links on its products with the relevant rel attribute

Google states in several places that in order to comply with its guidelines, links that are being used for advertising purposes should be both designated as such, and prevent from passing PageRank.

One way Taboola does that is by adding the rel=“nofollow” attribute to all of the links that are related to Taboola. This guarantees that Google will not crawl, pass PageRank or otherwise view these links as part of your website.

In addition, although it is not considered a requirement, Taboola also marks all sponsored links with the rel=“sponsored” link attribute, which goes the extra step to guarantee that sponsored links are being properly identified.

Taboola redirects all sponsored content and links through an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file directive

In its “paid links” guidelines, and in it’s “link schemes” guidelines, Google states that in order to comply with its guidelines, links that are being used for advertising purposes should be designated as such.

One way Taboola does that is by blocking Googlebot and all other search engines bots’ access to Taboola recommended pages using a redirect to an intermediate page that is blocked by a robots.txt directive. This guarantees that Google will not crawl, pass PageRank or otherwise view these links as part of your website.