John Mueller of Google discourages you from making generalizations about links. Links from news sites, German sites, or the sites of really good-looking SEOs (bad joke?) are not necessarily more or less valuable than links from other types of sites.

This morning, John responded to a Twitter thread by questioning why links from news sites should be treated differently. “The web is the web”

Certainly, if you examine a website or page and determine it to be spammy, you should avoid it. It is not the case, however, that all links from all news websites are desirable.

Then he adds, “However, focusing on the type of website is somewhat of a broad generalization. Undoubtedly, links are handled differently, but it depends more on the type of the current page and their placement within it. That’s like saying “All Germans are…” — it’s too general.” “Also keep in mind that the internal architectures of various types of websites are vastly dissimilar. A website that continuously publishes new content is vastly distinct from a site that serves as a reliable resource. If you wish to be technical, consider the pagerank algorithm,” he added.

Obviously, in the past, everyone desired links from pages with a high PageRank, but we no longer know PageRank scores. Then, individuals desired.edu links because they typically had a high PageRank, and we began to generalize and assume which types of websites had a high PageRank. The issue is that we no longer know the PageRank score of an individual page, and third-party metrics don’t really provide us with any insight into this.