Does Google crawler understand & flag a blog post has text asserting sponsorship with dofollow outbound link?

[kekepeche]

I kind of know the answer, but just wanted to get some feedback from others.

For the sake of argument, assume there are no other issues with the linking blog, such as: too many ads, thin content, etc.

Question: If you make a payment for a blog post with a dofollow link, and in the blog post there is something to the effect of: "this post has been sponsored by..."

Will Google crawlers detect that and flag that as an unnatural link?

[willcritchlow]

Hi there. What we know for certain is that these kinds of signals show up in manual warnings delivered via Search Console, and are a signal that a human quality reviewer would pay attention to. Everything about exactly what Google is doing algorithmically has some element of guesswork to it, but this is a machine-detectable pattern that I would think would be very likely to be detected automatically and the links discounted.

[Sidenote: it wouldn't be the crawler that did this - it would happen at some stage after that - just a semantic difference, but thought it was worth adding for clarity.]