However, for now, news rankings are largely based on a publisher’s niche authority, and Google still considers authority as backlinks:
Authoritativeness signals help prioritize high-quality information from the most reliable sources. To do this, our systems are designed to identify signals that help determine which pages demonstrate expertise, authority, and trustworthiness on a given topic, based on feedback from search raters. These signals might include whether others value the source for similar queries, or whether other notable sites on the topic link to the story.
rel="sponsored" and rel="UGC" attributes
Last but not least, I am really surprised by the effort Google has put spain mobile database into being able to identify sponsored and UGC backlinks and distinguish them from other nofollow links.
If all of these backlinks are to be ignored, why care about differentiating one from the other? Especially since John Muller has suggested that Google might try to treat these types of links differently .
After all, advertising on popular platforms requires huge budgets, and huge budgets are the attribute of large, popular brands.
User-generated content, when considered outside of the review spam paradigm, is about real customers giving them real-life endorsements.
It’s also possible that by distinguishing between different types of links, Google will try to figure out which nofollow links are used for entity building purposes: Google has no problem with user-generated content or sponsored content on sites, but both have historically been used as methods to manipulate page rankings. As such, webmasters are encouraged to put a nofollow attribute on these links (along with other reasons to use nofollow). However, nofollowed links can still be helpful to Google (such as entity recognition), so they’ve previously stated that they may view this as a suggestion rather than a directive like a robotsxt ban rule would be on your own site.