Google's John Mueller has responded to a question about how Google treats outbound links from a site that has a link-related penalty, suggesting that this may not work in the same way as many assume. The question, which is vague, involves whether links from one site that lost rankings could transfer harmful signals to other ones. Mueller's answer suggests that Google may not necessarily treat links from problematic sites as harmful but may instead ignore them entirely. He also mentioned that Google simply ignores low quality links and may not use them to identify spammy sites. However, he also mentioned a patent for link distance ranking, which he invented and uses a phrase that does not exist in the patent.