Back in the day, when backlinks weren't such a spam vector, sites (usually small personal sites) used to be part of webrings; they'd dedicate part of their pages to promoting other sites in the same network of sites.
This stopped being a thing for a few reasons, a big one being that Google's approach to content changed in response to comment spam, purchased backlinks, and other black hat SEO techniques.
I still think webrings are a fun tool to help create a sense of community. I don't want to set them up in the name of building SEO juice, I want to use them in the old-school way, as a way to promote members of the webring in small template modules.
I want to set them up to avoid any SEO penalties, with rel=nofollow
attributes, but my question is this: Since you could describe this as a bartered system for site promotion, should I use sponsored
instead of nofollow
?