Since the Penguin 4.0 update Google devalues bad links versus demoting the pages they link to. So when John was asked why Google Search Console doesn’t have a way to notify webmasters of bad links pointing to their site, John said “If we recognize them, we can just ignore them – no need to have you do anything in most cases.”

Here are the tweets asking about this:

Can links hurt you? Well, Google still has manual actions for unnatural links to your site – so bad links can hurt you. But algorithmically, and the tools that would detect it algorithmically likely would not hurt your site – instead they would be ignored, as if they are not there – which may be like it hurts.

Manual actions would trigger a notification, so in that case, you’d be notified of an issue. But algorithmically or automatically, if Google detects bad links, they would just ignore them. So this logic makes sense, Google wouldn’t need to tell you which links are bad because there is nothing you need to do.

Forum discussion at Twitter.