MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — A Google rep has once again clarified that its search systems do not automatically penalize sites for adult links if they are not spam.
On a recently posted installment of the company’s Q&A YouTube series “Google SEO Office Hour,” Google’s Lizzi Sassman answered a question from a user, who asked “Are spammy links from porn sites bad for rankings?”
The user stated, “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?”
Sassman replied, “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.”
Sassman’s reply, first flagged by the Search Engine Roundtable site, corroborated information provided by Google’s John Mueller in 2016, when he confirmed that for the search giant, “adult sites aren't automatically spam, and links from them not automatically unnatural/problematic."
The Google reps have also explained that Google Systems considers the intention of the link when administering penalties.
“First off, I'd try to evaluate whether your site really created those spammy links,” Mueller explained in another video. “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.”