Often I see webmaster basically disavow links simply because they are from a site that is written in a different language, on a ccTLD or caters to a different geographic market than their own site. Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that "the quality of links doesn't depend on their nationality or the languages they speak."
This site gets tons of links from sites in China, Japan, Israel, Europe and so on. Some of those sites have anchor text pointing to this site in Japanese, some use Hebrew, some use French and so on. Having links and anchors from these sites is not a bad thing or spammy by itself.
We know the Penguin algorithm is a global algorithm. Meaning, it doesn't need to be like Panda and changed based on the language of the page. But still, Google isn't going to say, oh - this link is from China, in Chinese and your site is in American, written in English - thus the link should be penalized. Google doesn't do that.
Here are the set of tweets:
@_nikkiboy @_nikkiboy @googlewmc No, the quality of links doesn't depend on their nationality or the languages they speak.
— John Mueller (@JohnMu) October 8, 2016
Forum discussion at Twitter.
