Google’s John Mueller responded to some concerns on Reddit about “toxic links.” He was asked where do these toxic links come from, in which he replied “Toxic links is all about selling tools.” He told the individual “don’t get hung up about it.”

Yes, there are a few tools out there that help identify poor quality or even spammy links. But are poor quality or spammy links “toxic” when Google ignores those links and often does not penalize for those types of links?

Yea, in the early days, Google would penalize sites that had a bunch of bad or deceptive links but with Penguin 4.0, Google ignores bad links. Of course, there can be outliers where Google would just distrust a whole site but that is rare.

But in general, Google has said it has no internal concept of toxic domains and that you can ignore toxic links and the tools that report on them.

The question is – do you?

Forum discussion at Reddit.