With the release of real time Penguin, there have been a lot of questions about link quality and link value.  In the last Webmaster Office Hours, John Mueller was asked specifically about site wide links, such as those found on blogrolls.

Now, blogroll links used to be pretty common many years ago, but as reciprocal linking came under fire, many people dropped blogrolls and site wide links to sites they didn’t own.  The question came up about whether legitimate site wide links, such as those placed on blogrolls could be hurting his site and whether they should be disavowed or should he not worry about them.

I like that last option.  In general, if these are normal organic links that are happening that are pointing at your content, then I would just let them be, that’s the way the internet works.  People link to your content, if your students have blogs and they think this is actually a teacher that knows what he’s talking about, then that’s a good link, that’s not something you need to disavow just because its a site wide link or in a blogroll.

He was then asked if they could seem artificial because they are in a blogroll.

No.  I wouldn’t worry about where people are linking from.  If these are organic links pointing at your site, then that’s perfectly fine.

So you don’t need to automatically remove or disavow links simply because they are site wide or in a blogroll.