What is a "Bad Link" in Google's eyes? Low DA?
-
Hi there,
I'm going through my link profile and I noticed I have a few links that are from <10 DA sites. One has a DA of 6. Should I remove these?
Aside from any referral traffic I receive from these links (I know there is none), are these links hurting me?
What should I look out for in a site I may guest post on?Thanks!
Travis -
That happens for 3 reasons
-
It is a low competitive keyword where EMD is very strong. Low profit (around £0,50-0,90 CPC)
-
He is using automated software like No Hands SEO or GSA which automatically generate relevant blog comments and split the links to follow and no follow so that they seem natural to Google. He will get penalised in the end as both of these tools are ok to use for web 2 properties but people dont know and use it on their web sites (penalty inc)
-
He is probably purchasing good follow links from a high DA and PA blog/PR network, there are plenty around for 100-200 a month.
All this make me conclude that your competitor has a money site or a Micro Niche Site meaning he wants to make a cash and dont care for long term goals (check for adsense and amazon affiliate links within the pages). If that is not the case then his SEO guy clearly needs to move forward!
Pure 2010 black hat practise.
-
-
I hate to say it, but I have a competitor ranking no.1 with around 500 nofollow links, and 19 dofollow links. These are mainly low quality blog comments from non relevant blogs. Its an EMD.
Its one of those things that make you throw your hands up in the air...
Of course it won't last for them... but its crazy.
-
It's actually natural to acquire low DA/PA links over time—not all websites have high DA/PA.
I wouldn't worry about a few low quality links. Google is looking for things like an excessive number of low quality links from historically spammy areas, e.g., article marketing, link directories, or excessive social bookmarking. And they ignore nofollow links altogether (so they say).
So technically, you could have 15,000 nofollow links from DA 0 websites and— at least according to Google's search quality team—they would be ignored altogether.
Contrary to what you might think, a link profile with only high DA links would actually look unnatural as well, because it would most likely be pruned and trimmed to be that way. Here's a good Moz post from a while back illustrating that concept: http://moz.com/blog/how-guest-bloggers-are-sleepwalking-their-way-into-penalties
-
All the anchor texts are pretty much our brand name or our website domain. No specific keywords. That should keep us safe, right? Thanks for your help!
-
Check the anchor texts first, PM me, I just dealt with some really bad negative SEO. I can help you if you like.
-
Yes but if the article was good enough that big names like Google or NYT wanted it... wouldn't it be pulling in the traffic from all the shares of it? And do you really want those sites outranking you for your own content? And wouldn't they likely NoFollow the link back to you anyway because of Google's current best practices concerning those sorts of links?
-
Hmm interesting. If Google or the NYT wanted to post an article you wrote on their home page with a link to your site, would you say no and put it on your 5k visitor/month site instead?
The exposure is worthwhile if no one will be able to find the content on your own site anyway.
-
Have you received an Unnatural Links warning or have you noticed pages losing steam after receiving links from these places? If not, I'd say don't have them removed because you may inadvertently hurt yourself. Just make sure that any links you work to create yourself are natural & relevant.
As for Guest Posting: "if you go to the time and effort of producing great content why would you want it to be on someone else’s site when it could be on yours." [See this thread: http://moz.com/community/q/in-2013-is-guest-blogging-a-worthwhile-activity]
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
When i search for my domain name - google asks "did you mean" - why?
Hi all, I just noticed something quite odd - if i do a search for my domain name (see: http://goo.gl/LBc1lz) google shows my domain as first result, but it also asks "did i mean" and names another website with very similar name. the other site has far lower PA/DA according to Moz, any ideas why google is doing this? and more inportantly how i could stop it? please advise James
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | isntworkdull0 -
Website with only a portion being 'mobile friendly' -- what to tell Google?
I have a website for desktop that does a lot of things, and have converted part of it do show pages in a mobile friendly format based on the users device. Not responsive design, but actual diff code with different formatting by mobile vs desktop--but each still share the same page url name. Google allows this approach. The mobile-friendly part of the site is not as extensive as desktop, so there are pages that apply to the desktop but not for mobile. So the functionality is limited some for mobile devices, and therefore some pages should only be indexed for desktop users. How should that page be handled for Google crawlers? If it is given a 404 not found for their mobile bot will Google properly still crawl it for the desktop, or will Google see that the url was flagged as 'not found' and not crawl it for the desktop? I asked a similar question yest, but it was not stated clearly. Thanks,Ted
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | friendoffood0 -
Remove URLs that 301 Redirect from Google's Index
I'm working with a client who has 301 redirected thousands of URLs from their primary subdomain to a new subdomain (these are unimportant pages with regards to link equity). These URLs are still appearing in Google's results under the primary domain, rather than the new subdomain. This is problematic because it's creating an artificial index bloat issue. These URLs make up over 90% of the URLs indexed. My experience has been that URLs that have been 301 redirected are removed from the index over time and replaced by the new destination URL. But it has been several months, close to a year even, and they're still in the index. Any recommendations on how to speed up the process of removing the 301 redirected URLs from Google's index? Will Google, or any search engine for that matter, process a noindex meta tag if the URL's been redirected?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | trung.ngo0 -
What's your daily SEO checklist?
First thing every morning I login to Google Webmaster tools looking for any errors, review data, sites linking to us, etc. I then login to Google Analytics and SEOMOz to check traffic to our terms to see if there have been any changes that need to be addressed. What's your daily checklist?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Prospector-Plastics1 -
What's the best internal linking strategy for articles and on-site resources?
We recently added an education center to our site with articles and information about our products and industry. What is the best way to link to and from that content? There are two options I'm considering: Link to articles from category and subcategory pages under a section called "related articles" and link back to these category and subcategory pages from the articles: category page <<--------->> education center article education center article <<---------->> subcategory page Only link from the articles to the category and subcategory pages: education center article ---------->> category page education center article ---------->> subcategory page Would #1 dilute the SEO value of the category and subcategory pages? I want to offer shoppers links to more information if they need it, but this may also take them away from the products. Has anyone tested this? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | pbhatt0 -
"Jump to" Links in Google, how do you get them?
I have just seen yoast.com results in Google and noticed that nearly all the indexed pages show a "Jump to" link So instead of showing the full URL under the title tag, it shows these type of links yoast.com › SEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters
yoast.com › Social Media
yoast.com › Analytics With the SEO, Social Media and Analytics all being clickable. How has he achieved this? And is it something to try and incorporate in my sites?0 -
Static links google guidelines
Google recommends to have static links it in guidelines Are breadcrumbs and static text link the same ? or in addition to breadcrumbs do I need static links on my page going from page A to B etc... The issue I have with static links this way is that if I look at the PR paper that would decrease the juice of my homepage ( which is the page I want to give the most juice to ) Thx,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Google SERPs do not display "cached"
When I am signed in with Google and searching sites, the snippets do not display the "cached" link. Not good since I am trying to see when a particular page was crawled. If I login to another server that I never use to browse and search from there the "cache" link does show up. Assumption: google knows who I am on my machine and is "helping" me.......but is there an easy way to turn this help off?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eyauuk0