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Does Google think less of your website if you link your site to a "lesser" website? I guess the question is similar to if you hang out with a lower class crowd, do your more upper class friends think less of you? With Google, the answer is no.
John Mueller of Google posted on Twitter "Does a link to a "lesser" website make a result less relevant? Do links on Wikipedia make it less useful? Not at all."
Obviously, if your links are spammy and paid and manipulative, Google will not trust your links. But if you link to a site that may be "lesser" in some eyes but the link is relevant and where you are linking to is relevant, then don't worry about it.
Here are those tweets so you see the full context:
One way to think about this is to consider the ultimate goal: provide relevant information. Does a link to a "lesser" website make a result less relevant? Do links on Wikipedia make it less useful? Not at all. (As an aside, no search engine uses DR/DA/PA/etc)
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) August 9, 2021
It is funny how over the years, even with the old Google PageRank scores, SEOs would shy away from linking out to a page that has less of a PageRank score than the origin page. I always found that funny and I guess it is still being done but with third party link metrics.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
