Google Says Spammy Links From Porn Sites Are Not Something To Prioritize

Google has posted one of its Google SEO office-hours, this one was posted today, recorded in January, after the Google layoffs news, and one question asked was about if you should worry about spammy from porn sites and if they can cause bad for ranking in Google Search.

In short, Lizzi Sassman from Google said not really. She said, “This is not something that you need to prioritize too much since Google Systems are getting better at figuring out if a link is spammy.”

This is similar to what John Mueller of Google said in 2016, saying “Adult sites aren’t automatically spam, and links from them not automatically unnatural / problematic.” Of course, the question here is that we know the links are spammy and from adult sites. The question before was, the links were from adult sites and not necessarily spammy.

The question was asked and answered at the 5:20 mark in the video:

Here is the transcript:

Are spammy links from porn sites bad for ranking?

Anonymous is asking, I’ve seen a lot of spammy back links from porn websites linking to our site over the past month using the Google Search Console link tool. We do not want these. Is this bad for ranking and what can I do about it?

This is not something that you need to prioritize too much since Google Systems are getting better at figuring out if a link is spammy. But if you’re concerned or you’ve received a manual action, you can use the disavow tool in Search Console. You’ll need to create a list of the spammy links and then upload it to the tool. Do a search for disavow in Search Console for more steps on how to do this.

Later on in the video, there is a question about disavowing links in general. Google has downplayed the importance of disavowing over the years and this is related to this question, so here is that transcript:

Will disavowing links make my site rank better?

John: Jimmy asks, will disavowing spammy links linking to my website help recover from an algorithmic penalty?

So first off, I’d try to evaluate whether your site really created those spammy links. It’s common for sites to have random, weird links, and Google has a lot of practice ignoring those. On the other hand, if you actively built significant spammy links yourself, then yes, cleaning those up would make sense. The disavow tool can help if you can’t remove the links at the source. That said, this will not position your site as it was before, but it can help our algorithms to recognize that they can trust your site again, giving you a chance to work up from there. There’s no low effort, magic trick that makes a site pop up back afterwards. You really have to put in the work, just as if you did it from the start.

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Forum discussion at Twitter.