Vanessa Fox posted an interesting blog post on the Google SiteMaps blog. The post followed Search Engine Watch Live Seattle and she wanted to use this blog to share two of the questions the Google team received during the event.

In the post, she notes that links from “bad neighborhood” sites cannot hurt a site’s rankings, but it won’t help at all. On the other side, she confirms that outgoing links to bad neighborhood and spam sites can hurt one’s site rankings:

“In general, linking to web spammers and “bad neighborhoods” can harm your site’s indexing and ranking. And while links from these sites won’t harm your site, they won’t help your indexing or ranking. Only natural links add value and are helpful for indexing and ranking your site.”