Google’s John Mueller On Links From News Sites

Google’s John Mueller commented in a Twitter discussion about the supposed ranking power of links from news sites and offered a different way of thinking about how Google treats those links. I thought for sure all those links from major news sites would help the sites rank better for other terms. So, what happens with viral PR News link campaigns is that there are lots of links but no keyword rankings lift. There tends to be a way of thinking that some sites are “authority sites” and that links from those sites provide more ranking power. But that definitively ended many years ago, when high PageRank sites stopped correlating with high rankings.