Google’s John Mueller responded to a question about how Google treats outbound links from a site that has a link-related penalty. His answer suggests the situation may not work in the way many assume.
An SEO asked on Bluesky whether a site that has what they described as a “link penalty” could affect the value of outbound links. The question is somewhat vague because a link penalty can mean different things.
- Was the site buying or building low quality inbound links?
- Was the site selling links?
- Was the site involved in some kind of link building scheme?
Despite the vagueness of the question, there’s a legitimate concern underlying it, which is about whether getting links from a site that lost rankings could also transfer harmful signals to other sites.
They asked:
“Hey @johnmu.com hypothetically speaking. If a site has a link penalty are the outbound links from that site devalued? Or do they have the ability to pass on poor signals.. ie bad neighbours?”
There are a number of link related algorithms that I have written about in the past. And as often happens in SEO, other SEOs will pick up on what I wrote and paraphrase it without mentioning my article. Then someone else will paraphrase that and after a couple generations of that there are some weird ideas circulating around.
Poor Signals AKA Link Cooties
If you really want to dig deep into link-related algorithms, I wrote a long and comprehensive article titled What Is Google’s Penguin Algorithm. Many of the research papers discussed in that article were never written about by anyone until I wrote about them. I strongly encourage you to read that article, but only if you’re ready to commit to a really deep dive into the topic.
Another one is about an algorithm that starts with a seed set of trusted sites, and then the further a site is from that seed set, the likelier that site is spam. That’s about link distance ranking, ranking links. Nobody had ever written about this link distance ranking patent until I wrote about it first. Over the years, other SEOs have written about it after reading my article, and though they don’t link to my article, they’re mostly paraphrasing what I wrote. You know how I can tell those SEOs copied my article? They use the phrase “link distance ranking,” a phrase that I invented. Yup! That phrase does not exist in the patent. I invented it, lol.
The other foundational article that I wrote is about Google’s Link Graph and how it plays into ranking web pages. Everything I write is easy to understand and is based on research papers and patents that I link to so that you can go and read them yourself.
The idea behind the research papers and patents is that there are ways to use the link relationships between sites to identify what a site is about, but also whether it’s in a spammy neighborhood, which means low-quality content and/or manipulated links.
The articles about Link Graphs and link distance ranking algorithms are the ones that are related to the question that was asked about outbound links passing on a negative signal. The thing about it is that those algorithms aren’t about passing a negative signal. They’re based on the intuition that good sites link to other good sites, and spammy sites tend to link to other spammy sites. There’s no outbound link cooties being passed from site to site.
So what probably happened is that one SEO copied my article, then added something to it, and fifty others did the same thing, and then the big takeaway ends up being about outbound link cooties. And that’s how we got to this point where someone’s asking Mueller if sites pass “poor signals” (link cooties) to the sites they link to.
Google May Ignore Links From Problematic Sites
Google’s John Mueller was seemingly confused about the question, but he did confirm that Google basically just ignores low quality links. In other words, there are no “link cooties” being passed from one site to another one.
Mueller responded:
“I’m not sure what you mean with ‘has a link penalty’, but in general, if our systems recognize that a site links out in a way that’s not very helpful or aligned with our policies, we may end up ignoring all links out from that site. For some sites, it’s just not worth looking for the value in links.”
Mueller’s answer suggests that Google does not necessarily treat links from problematic sites as harmful but may instead choose to ignore them entirely. This means that rather than passing value or negative signals, those links may simply be excluded from consideration.
That doesn’t mean that links aren’t used to identify spammy sites. It just means that spamminess isn’t something that is passed from one site to another.
Ignoring Links Is Not The Same As Passing Negative Signals
The distinction about ignoring links is important because it separates two different ideas that are easily conflated.
- One is that a link can lose value or be discounted.
- The other is that a link can actively pass negative signals.
Mueller’s explanation aligns with the idea that Google simply ignores low-quality links altogether. In that case, the links are not contributing positively, but they are also not spreading a negative signal to other sites. They’re just ignored.
And that kind of aligns with the idea of something else that I was the first to write about, the Reduced Link Graph. A link graph is basically a map of the web created from all the link relationships from one page to another page. If you drop all the links that are ignored from that link graph, all the spammy sites drop out. That’s the reduced link graph.
Mueller cited two interesting factors for ignoring links: helpfulness and the state of not being aligned with their policies. That helpfulness part is interesting, also kind of vague, but it kind of makes sense.
Takeaways:
- Links from problematic low quality sites may be ignored
- Links don’t pass on “poor signals”
- Negative signal propagation is highly likely not a thing
- Google’s systems appear to prioritize usefulness and policy alignment when evaluating links
- If you write an article based on one of mine, link back to it. :)\
Featured Image by Shutterstock/minifilm
