Google's John Mueller reconfirmed that Google Search may simply ignore outbound links from sites that violate its search spam policies. This is not new, Google has been doing this manually and algorithmically for years now but he reiterated this on Bluesky.
John wrote, "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."
He said, this is a general thing, saying, "I'm not sure what you mean with "has a link penalty", but in general."
Explaining, "For some sites, it's just not worth looking for the value in links."
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.
— John Mueller (@johnmu.com) April 9, 2026 at 11:26 AM
Forum discussion at Bluesky.
