When Google released the latest Penguin update, they said that the update was about devaluing spammy links. Google would simply ignore the bad links and the website would not be demoted because of these links.
Google might distrust websites with spam links
In a new video on YouTube, Google's John Mueller said that Google might decide to distrust the whole website if there is a clear pattern of spammy and manipulative links:
"So for the most part when we can recognize that something is problematic and any kind of a spammy link and we will try to ignore it.
If our systems recognize that they can't isolate and ignore these links across a website. If we see a very strong pattern there then it can happen that our algorithms say well we we really have kind of lost trust with this website and at the moment based on the bigger picture on the web, we need to be more on almost a conservative side when it comes to to understanding this website's content and ranking it in the search results. And then you can see a drop in the visibility there.
But for the most part, like the the web is pretty messy and we recognize that, we have to ignore a lot of the links out there. So for the most part I think that's fine. Usually you would only see this kind of a drop if it's really a strong and a clear pattern that's associated with the website."
John Mueller added the following on Twitter:
"This is the case for many spam & low-quality signals -- we'll work to ignore the irrelevant effects, but if it's hard to find anything useful that's remaining, our algorithms can end up being sceptical with the site overall."
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