Google’s John Mueller does not want you to make generalizations about links. Links from news sites or sites from Germany, or sites from really good-looking SEOs (bad joke?) are not necessarily worth more or less than links from other types of sites.

The topic came up this morning where John replied to a Twitter thread saying, “why would links from news sites be treated differently? The web is the web.”

Sure, if you look at a site or a page and you see the page is spammy – stay away from those pages. But to generalize that all links from all news sites are links you want, that is not a thing.

Why would links from news sites be treated differently? The web is the web.

— johnmu likes 🥚 staplers 🥚 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2023

Then he goes on to say, “Focusing on the type of site is a bit of a broad generalization though. Certainly links are treated differently, but it’s more a matter of the type of the current page, and how it’s within the page. It’s like saying “All Germans are …” — that’s too broad.” “The other thing to keep in mind is that different kinds of sites have vastly different internal architectures. A site constantly publishing new content is extremely different from a stable reference site. Think about how pagerank works, if you want to be technical,” he added.

The other thing to keep in mind is that different kinds of sites have vastly different internal architectures. A site constantly publishing new content is extremely different from a stable reference site. Think about how pagerank works, if you want to be technical.

— johnmu likes 🥚 staplers 🥚 (@JohnMu) April 11, 2023

Of course, back in the old days, everyone wanted links from high PageRank pages, but we don’t know PageRank scores now. Then people wanted .edu links because they tended to have high PageRank and then we started to generalize and assume which types of sites had high PageRank. Thing is, we don’t know the PageRank score of an individual page these days and the third-party metrics don’t really give us a clue on that.

So the advice? Write content that gets you links naturally?

Forum discussion at Twitter.