Google Ignores Links Rather Than Penalizing Them. Three Clarifications From This Year.
Three separate statements from John Mueller this year look unrelated until you put them next to each other. Read together, they describe a single policy that most link-building plans are built on the wrong side of.
Clarification one: comment link spam does nothing, in either direction
A site owner wrote in, upset about porn anchors being dropped into his blog comments by a spammer, and reported that traffic was falling despite disavowing.
Mueller’s answer: “These links all have no effect — they’re from spammers dropping links into comments. These would not have any effect, positive nor negative, on your site.”
Not a penalty. Not a risk. Also not an opportunity. The links are inert.
Clarification two: old outbound links to sites that turned shady won’t get you penalized
A lodging site had, years earlier, linked out to a real business that later lost its domain to someone serving shady content. The question was whether that old link now damages the linking site.
Mueller: “No. It’s good to keep things fresh overall, but the web is full of turmoil.”
He added the qualification that matters: if your entire site’s value has become obsolete, that is a different kind of problem than a handful of broken links.
Clarification three: linking your own brand sites together is fine at reasonable scale
Asked whether sister brands could publish a partner page linking to each other so customers understand they share an owner, Mueller said this is pretty common and he does not see a problem when done at reasonable scale.
This one is a reversal worth noting. Matt Cutts warned against linking many sites together in 2013 and again in 2014. The current guidance is closer to “fine, unless you turn it into an obvious network.”
What the three have in common
Google ignores link cruft. That has been the stated position since around 2016 — it discards what it cannot trust rather than assigning a penalty for receiving it. The three clarifications are just that policy applied to three different question shapes: links you receive, links you give out, and links between properties you control.
The practical consequence is easy to state and hard to accept: bad links mostly cost you nothing, and also earn you nothing.
That sounds like good news, and for anyone worried about a competitor’s spam campaign it is. But it removes the most comfortable theory behind bulk link acquisition — that even if the links are weak, at least you accumulated something. You didn’t. You accumulated a growing list of URLs on the internet that Google has decided not to count.
Why volume has no floor
Think of it as an examination. If the examiner refuses to look at evidence from a source they consider unreliable, then adding more evidence from that source doesn’t move the score toward zero — it just doesn’t move the score.
| What you bought | What Google does | What you actually gained |
|---|---|---|
| Comment links | Ignores them | Nothing, plus a disavow temptation |
| Low-quality directory listings, templated | Ignores the domain’s outbound links | A number in a dashboard |
| Sister-site interlinks beyond a reasonable network | Usually fine until the pattern is obvious | Real value only while it stays modest |
| A listing on a reviewed directory that describes you | Treats it as a citation | A durable, third-party description |
The last row is the one with an upside, and it is also the one that costs the most work per unit. That is not a coincidence.
What this means for how you plan
If unearned links are inert rather than harmful, then the correct response is not to remove them. It is to stop counting them.
Two changes follow. First, stop producing links whose only function is to increase a count. If you cannot answer “what does this page say about us, in its own words,” the placement has no job. Second, stop auditing for risk and start auditing for evidence. Instead of asking which links might be hurting you, ask which pages would let someone who has never heard of you understand what you do — and whether those pages are still live and still indexed.
That reframe also resolves the disavow question most teams get stuck on. If weak links neither help nor hurt, and a small disavow is unlikely to change anything, then a disavow file is only worth building when you are correcting a specific, traceable pattern of manipulation. Everything else is inventory you can simply stop maintaining.
The practical upshot is that the only placements worth having are the ones a machine can read and quote, which is a matching and writing problem more than a volume problem. https://backlinksubmit.org handles that first part: a product URL matched to relevant directories and communities from a handpicked list, manual submissions, and a console showing which platforms have been submitted and how each is progressing.
FAQ
Do spammy links to my site hurt my rankings?
Per Google, generally no — they are ignored rather than penalized. That means they also don’t help, so there is nothing to gain from accumulating them.
Should I disavow my old directory links?
Usually not. Low-authority is not the same as manipulative, and disavowing a small number of links rarely changes anything. Reserve the file for a discrete, traceable pattern you deliberately created.
Can I link my own sites together?
Google says linking sister brands to communicate common ownership is common and fine at a reasonable scale. The risk is not the link; it is a network that becomes obvious — dozens of properties, identical templates, reciprocal links everywhere.
If bad links are ignored, why build links at all?
Because the goal was never the link. It was the description — a third-party page that says what you do, written by someone with their own audience. The link is how you find that page. The description is what makes it worth having.
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