Google’s John Mueller said on Twitter that the source of the link alone doesn’t make the link a bad link. It also depends on other factors. For example, John asked if the the destination owner placed the link on the source themselves or not.

Here are the tweets from more context:

We know that Google clarified almost two years ago that the Google Penguin algorithm looked at the link source and not the destination. Does Penguin know how the link got on that source? I do not know.

Here John Mueller is saying that the source of the link is not the only criteria uses to define if a link is bad. Maybe Google has methods to see if you personally added the link to that source or not? Or maybe if there are enough bad links, Google makes certain assumptions.

This type of conversation I am having above is the debate around negative SEO and if Google can detect negative SEO patterns or not. That is a topic we covered here many times.

So what do you think of John’s latest statement here on link sources and the intent of that link?

Forum discussion at Twitter.