Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Do other sites linking to my page with a low domain authority affect my rankings?
-
Hello, my page authority 30, I see other page with an authority of 21 for example linking to us. Is this good or bad, does this affect our ranking? A lot of these don't have anchor text, I'm guessing we should reach out to these webmaster to include anchor text with the keywords we want to drive traffic to this page or make as descriptive as possible?
Thanks!
Laura
-
Backlinks from DA 21 sites are nothing to sneeze at. I'll take them all day long. Moz actually just rolled out a great tool called "Spam Score". The lower a spam score the better. It will show you the spam score for any links that Moz has found. Spammy links can affect your rankings, so spammy links should be investigated and possibly disavowed. If your site's own spam score is low, I wouldn't get my panties in a knot.
-
Hi there
A lot of this will come down to common sense and research. A couple of things I would point out:
Anchor text - Try and steer clear of exact match anchor text. It can trip spam filters if you have too much of that going on in your backlink profile. Try to make more use of branded anchor text. You can read morehere.
nofollow links - Don't disregard links because they are nofollow. They can be valuable and important, especially if that link is relevant to your business and helps expands your visibility to your audience. There's a great article here about nofollow.
PageRank - Google doesn't update this metric anymore. You can read more here. There are metrics elsewhere via OSE and more below that I list that you can find just as useful.
All in all - the best way to define a bad link is to use your own intuition and common sense:
-
Does this link help my website?
-
Is this link relevant to my website?
-
Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?
-
Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?
-
If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?
-
Are the links from directory templates? (example)
-
Inspect URLs with blatant spam words
-
Free
-
Porn
-
XXX
-
Submit
-
Directory
-
Paid
-
Links
-
URL
-
Sex
-
etc.
-
Check for multiple domains and URLs on the same IPs
-
This can usually show link farms or spam
Google views backlinks as who you associate with. If you hang out with shady people, you're probably a shady person. If you hang out with intelligent people, people probably think you're intelligent. Same applies for Google.
Hope this helps! Good luck!
-
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
-
Unsolved How to remove these spammy links
I've noticed that my website's spam score has increased recently, and upon further investigation, I found some spammy links pointing to my site. and my website www.fastlandoffer.com Moz Smap Score is 16
Link Explorer | | FredericoSeo
5 I haven't engaged in any spammy tactics, so I'm not sure how they got there. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions on how to effectively remove these spammy links from my website and improve its overall credibility and search engine rankings? Any insights or experiences would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!0 -
How do I find http backlinks to my domain?
Hi, We spotted a number of sites linking to us from http sites, not https sites. How can I use backlink tools to find just those from http sites? Right now I'm looking at exporting a spreadsheet with 3.3 million entries and filtering - and there's not one person here who wants to do that! Thanks in advance. Screen Shot 2021-11-03 at 10.49.12.png
Link Explorer | | mark_seomoz10 -
My backlinks are not indexing , Added in the link tracking list too
I have waited for three days to index my backlinks on moz but still they are not indexed in moz backlink index 😞 How to index backlinks in moz so that I can track all are ok ?
Link Explorer | | esdda81111 -
WP Events Calendar Creates URLs Too Long in Site Crawler
My travel/tourism site is on WP and using an Events plugin that ads a calendar of events to many pages. The MOZ crawler is indexing almost 46K links with a URL too long, but the site only has about 3.8K pages indexed in Google. I can tell MOZ is indexing the same pages over and over again but just adding a random calendar month and year. Here are some examples. https://www.visitcurrituck.com/four-day-stay/?full=1&long_events=1&country[0]=US&ajaxCalendar=1&mo=10&yr=2003 https://www.visitcurrituck.com/four-day-stay/?full=1&long_events=1&country%5B0%5D=US&ajaxCalendar=1&mo=10&yr=2034 https://www.visitcurrituck.com/beach-houses-family-time/?full=1&long_events=1&country%5B0%5D=US&ajaxCalendar=1&mo=1&yr=1873 Any advice on how to prevent MOZ from indexing this way? I don't believe that Google is seeing this also, but maybe they are. I just know my site has over 63K issues and I'm sure at least 75% or more is because of the way they are picking up on the events calendar. Thanks!
Link Explorer | | CinivaAgency1 -
Spam links and Domain Authority
I have a site that I know was Domain Authority 35 but now Domain Authority 25 after someone sent a load of spam links to it, how can this be correct and how can I change it? Is it worth doing a disavow and will moz take that into account?
Link Explorer | | BobAnderson0 -
How do you check for .gov and .edu backlinks using the new link explorer?
I'm trying to do an audit but I can't seem to figure out how to find .edu and .gov backlinks from the new link explorer. Can someone please help? I'm trying to learn how as open site explorer will be replaced by the link explorer. Thank you!
Link Explorer | | AFARiva1 -
Open site explorer
Hi, I am a little confused how open site explorer updates (not sure its working as aspected). It shows the recent discovered links but these then disappear and do not show in the main list (Inbound links) after a few days. Plus the links in the inbound links tab has not changed for nearly 10 weeks, my other tools are showing the new links..... Does it update on a certain data, if so where can i check the status? Thanks
Link Explorer | | 720digital0