Google’s John Mueller participated in an interesting conversation on Mastodon about linking between sites that are different languages and whether or not that may impact rankings.
The person asking the question was afraid that receiving links from a non-English language site to their English language site might negatively affect that sites ability to rank.
There is a belief that linking from a site from another language might affect the English language websites ability to rank geographically in English speaking countries.
The original poster wrote:
“Hi @johnmu I had a question.
We have several non-English language websites and we want to help our English website rank better.
Can linking from non-English sites help the English site with its pagerank and ranking?”
John Mueller reasonably assumed that the person asking the question was talking about linking their own non-English versions to their own English language websites.
So that’s the context of John’s first answer, a context that changed twice as the conversation progressed.