Links from a penalised site.

[TimHolmes]

Hey Mozzers,

Recently we have had a series of agencies in to pitch for work, one group mentioned that due to our association with a possibly penalised product review website, any links and activity associated with the brand would hinder our SEO.

We currently have a  good rating, but we are now no longer pushing our customers to the site as we move to a new platform. The current link back from this website is also no-followed.

Any thoughts on how this could impact us? And how the agencies determined the site was penalised and causing us problems.

Cheers

Tim

[paints-n-design]

Matt Cutts said once  in a video that "the punishment will not be passed on to your site. However, you will lose the value of the untrusted site's link."  But if it was nofollow, it never had value.

How they figured that out? Maybe they talk to each other, or they are simply not visible in Google anymore. But they can't know that for sure . At least it wont hurt you. Google them, put them into rank trackers (semrush or whatever) and see if there is some big change in visibility. Than you can asume a penalty or update hit.  But, I bet John Muller also said, what Matt Cuts was saying, normal case - no passing of punishment.

[GFD_Chris]

Hey Tim!

Definitely an interesting question. If the links are tagged as "nofollow" than you should be OK in general. Even if they weren't, there's a good chance that Google is simply discounting the value of the links.

If you're really worried about it, you could test adding the domain to your disavow file and waiting to see if there are any positive shifts in rankings during this time. In our experience with disavowing domains, if a site doesn't pass the eye-test of "this adds value to my site", than it's generally safe to disavow.

If you post the link I'd be happy to take a look!