Identifying Bad Domains
-
In the past week my website has not been doing well.
How can I look at a list of domains linking to my website to identify which ones are harmful and need to be removed. Is there a checklist of criteria that a linking doamin to meet for me to remove it?
Thank you for your help.
-
You've gotten some excellent advice already. I'll add a few of my thoughts.
First of all, have you been doing link building? If not, then this may not be the right road to go down. If you've noticed a drop just recently, it may be that the Panda algorithm is affecting your site and Panda really isn't about link quality. There was a big Panda update on May 20 although many sites started seeing changes a couple of days before that.
If you have been doing link building and you want to clean up your links then the goal is to find ones that were self made with the intention of gaming Google and then remove or disavow those. William's list is a good place to start.
-
Even with a tool like Link Detox (which I use and think is great), you'll still need to manually review every site as there will for sure be false positives. You'd probably be better off hiring someone to do this for you than trying it yourself.
-
Thank you for all your responses.
-
You are actually talking about link audits and identifying the bad links from the system. When it comes to link audit there are multiple tools available for it. If you are using Moz.com (Open Site Explorer) will give you the detailed insight of the links that are pointing back to your site. You can try other tools like Majestic SEO and Ahrefs.com for this. It is ideal to use the data of multiple tools like a data combination of GT, Moz.com, Ahrefs.com and Majestic SEO will be mind blowing.
Above tools will only give you the link profile but how to find the bad links out of it is another job. There are two ways here:
- Do it Manually
If you are going to do it manually then you need to set the parameters like which link is bad and which link in the system is worth including in the good list. Try to remove all the bad links and if they does not remove include them in the disavow file and submit it to Google.
- The Tool way!
There are tools like Link Detox and Link Risk that can do this job using their signals to identify a bad link. This is a little costly ideas as these tools are a little on the high end.
Although there are tools available but it is always a better idea to go manually on this as tools can guess wrong so you always have to check the things manually even after get passed by the system.
Hope this helps!
-
There are tools out there you can pay for to do this work for, things like linkdetox.com can be helpful to identify the bad links. Something like Rmoov is great to then begin to removal process.
If doing it on your own, you'll need to check out each questionable domain manually. You can rule out big domains that you know are not spammy, and focus on the ones you have no idea about. When looking at a domain, ask yourself the following:
-
Is this site indexed in Google?
-
Could I easily create a followed link from this domain to mine? OR pay for one?
-
Does this site seem to be scraping information of mine from other sources?
-
Is this site in English (or whichever language your site is in)?
-
Is it a crappy directory site? Article submission site? Other easily exploitable kind of site?
These are the sorts of things to look out for. Google doesn't want to count links for you if you made them for SEO purposes, or paid someone else to. If you look at a site, and it appears that their business model is building links, or they are spammy in anyway, you know it's a red flag.
Also, I'm learning more and more that when you're on the fence about a domain, disavow it.
-
-
Do a site:www.examplesite.com search in Google. This will show if Google has penalized them. Also you can run them all through SEMrush and see if they have been hit by Google, you can Identify that by their drop in organic traffic. That's two of many way to do the research.
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
-
I have 2 linking root domains on my URL. But I don't get the whole Root domain thing. So I don't understand how I can improve it?
I have 2 linking root domains on my URL. But I don't get the whole Root domain thing. So I don't understand how I can improve it? I copy and pasted this, from my Links page in my campaign because I can't seem to grasp what a root domain is: 'A higher number of good quality linking root domains improves a page's ranking potential'. Can some one explain to me what this is. As simply as possible. Here's my site www.Thumannagency.com Thanks in advance:)
Moz Pro | | MissThumann0 -
C-Block domains OSE
hi all quick question regarding c-block domains OSE tells me we have 70 c-block domains with a total 130 root domains, is it telling us 70 root domains re c-blocks as this is near impossible for us are c blocks listed as root domains or just links
Moz Pro | | Will_Craig0 -
Percentage of good links vs. bad
Hi Does anyone know the best way of determining good links from bad links using the SEO Moz tools? I bought some directory links to two or three pages on my site a few years back. The were all very obviously spammy because of the anchor text and I didn't have a high enough ratio of good links to counteract them. I read somewhere that if more than 10% of the links to a page have the same (or similar) anchor text, it's obvious that you're on the bad list.
Moz Pro | | nsjadmin0 -
OSE Domains & Subdomains
Is there a compelling reason that OSE treats subdomains as part of a parent domain, rather than as a separate site? Or is this just a technical limitation? I ask because it's my understanding that Google treats subdomains more like separate domains than like parts of the parent domain. OSE treating them more like folders creates some frustrating situations when researching niches that are heavily filled with blospot and wordpress.com blogs. First of all, the domain authority in these situations is not at all indicative of the strength of the site. It also makes it hard to evaluate linking root domains at a glance, since all blogspot blogs count as one domain. So to see all blogspot sites linking you have to go to the full link list -- where each site may be listed hundreds of times -- and you can't group them because they're all considered the same domain. To be sure you when researching these niches you can just throw out domain authority as a metric, and export every report to excel where you can sort things in a way to make it easier to separate sites. But if there isn't a compelling SEO reason to have OSE function this way, I'd love to see those subdomains treated as separate sites so I can have access to all the easy to use SEOmoz metrics and layouts without the extra work. And of course if there is a compelling SEO reason for subdomains to be treated as domains, I'd love to be educated! : )
Moz Pro | | Ecreativeworks0 -
List sub-domains for a root domain.
Is there an easy way to find out all the sub domains registered for a given root domain. Our site (ea.com) has literally hundreds registered sub domains. I need to track down the ones that are public. It would be nice to get a list of public sub domains, along with some link metrics on each. Maybe this could be a new linkscape feature. Thanks, David Fricks
Moz Pro | | davidfricks0 -
Is there a way, to display historic data / chart of a domain?
Is there a funktion / tool, that displays domain data like: Domain Authority
Moz Pro | | softclick
Domain MozRank
Domain MozTrust
No. of Links
No. of linking Domains historical?1 -
Domain authority decrease after open site explorer update. Reasons?
Hi! I just noticed a decrease on our domain authority and also the page authority of several of our pages on the SeoMoz toolbar. For instance, DA went from 34 to 29. I was scared and confused, so I went to check it on the opensite explorer and saw that it had been updated. I want to ask you guys if the same happened with your metrics or is it just us. Because the strange thing about it is that we have been doing some good optimization work lately and also some linkbuilding, and actually our SERP’s have been improving in general, and some specific ones have been performing great. Our website is http://www.inmonova.com as a reference. Can anyone cast some light into this?
Moz Pro | | inmonova0 -
Why is my domain authority dropping?
I have been fixing broken links, doing a lot of on-site SEO keyword and page title improvement, and steadily building inbound links. Yet my domain authority and MozRanking is dropping, though my keyword rankings are improving. What is going on? Should I be concerned? How can I find out why my domain ranking is dropping, and how (and should I) fix this? Is this because I do not have a blog yet? What factors determine domain authority?
Moz Pro | | threedegreesinc0