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.
Potential spam websites with high DA linking back to us
-
Hey everybody,
I'm going through all my sites and disavowing crap links. However, I'm having trouble distinguishing which high DA sites to disavow. What would you do?
and
They both have tons of backlinks - both good and crap. The first has a DA of 72 and a Moz spam score of 4/17 and the second has a DA of 86 and a Moz spam score of 9/17
-
If anybody ends up searching for this topic please view this Whiteboard Friday with Rand. I think he actually ended up reading my question and answering it:
-
Unfortunately, it's very difficult to measure the impact of proactive disavow, for a number of reasons:
(1) The timeline of if and when Google processes disavows isn't very transparent
(2) The impact of bad links is usually only seen in large drops, and long after the fact of those linksFor most of us, I think proactively disavowing links carries the risk that those links might actually be passing value. So, if you start carving away at your link profile before you're in any danger, you stand to lose as much as you might gain down the road.
Risk profiling is tricky, and there are certainly sites on the verge of penalties or at high risk who should be proactive. I can't tell you where on the continuum you fall from just a couple of linking domains, but my gut reaction is that disavowing links isn't a good use of your time and energy right now.
-
Thank you for the feedback everybody.
You all make good points. I'm not facing an active penalty and I'm just trying to be proactive. All the links were organic in nature and there is no indication that black-hat backlink building has been performed on the websites that I'm optimizing. I think that too many SEOs have used the Disavow Tool as a proactive measure so I don't believe that Google will set us up in a trap for using it. My thought process was that I want to start with technical SEO, get the sites healthy on the back-end then implement a content marketing strategy that's been in the works for some time.
That being said, I think that I'll hold off on the disavow until I gather more information or read up on studies that have been performed regarding proactive disavow. If anybody has any insight on this please post it here as I am sure would be appreciated by all.
Cheers
-
I'm having a hard time seeing exactly which domains you're looking at, but with no other information, a DA=72, Spam=4 domain hardly seems like a red flag.
Let me ask this - what's your situation? Are you facing an active penalty, or are you being proactive? These are wildly different scenarios? How strong is your actual domain - do you have plenty of solid links. Often, it's not about the few bad links - it's about the link base. A strong site with a solid link base can handle some spam in the mix.
If you're being proactive, it's easy to cut too deep, and the risks are much, much higher. If you're actively stuck in a penalty situation that's obviously link-based and is eating a huge % of your rankings/traffic, then the math is wildly different (and you may have to cut deep).
-
Hey MEllsworth,
Whenever I go after links/decide to keep or disavow, I go off of the content of the site more-so than the DA exclusively. High DA is great and all, but I'd rather get a low/medium DA website on a page that has decent stats and the content is about my topic (a bonus if the whole site is on my topic). I could go make a wordpress.com blog in 10 minutes and get a DA 98 link, but that really isn't going to help me in itself.
Regarding your 2 examples, I would attempt to get my link removed and disavow those domains. They don't seem to be about a certain topic but rather anything and everything, plus they have some indications that they are spammy via OSE.
Best of luck - Ryan
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
-
WEbsite cannot be crawled
I have received the following message from MOZ on a few of our websites now Our crawler was not able to access the robots.txt file on your site. This often occurs because of a server error from the robots.txt. Although this may have been caused by a temporary outage, we recommend making sure your robots.txt file is accessible and that your network and server are working correctly. Typically errors like this should be investigated and fixed by the site webmaster. I have spoken with our webmaster and they have advised the below: The Robots.txt file is definitely there on all pages and Google is able to crawl for these files. Moz however is having some difficulty with finding the files when there is a particular redirect in place. For example, the page currently redirects from threecounties.co.uk/ to https://www.threecounties.co.uk/ and when this happens, the Moz crawler cannot find the robots.txt on the first URL and this generates the reports you have been receiving. From what I understand, this is a flaw with the Moz software and not something that we could fix form our end. _Going forward, something we could do is remove these rewrite rules to www., but these are useful redirects and removing them would likely have SEO implications. _ Has anyone else had this issue and is there anything we can do to rectify, or should we leave as is?
Moz Pro | | threecounties0 -
Tumblr and Link Equity
Hi Moz Community, I've recently decided to start a project where I gather 1,000 great examples of something that's searched for often, and am thinking that posting it to a Tumblr site like the following website did could be a great way to pass link equity back to my main site (with a little "site by [my site]" somewhere in the header or footer). While I was super pumped about this idea today, and have now gathered almost 500 of my examples (mentioned above), I am not seeing link equity passed from this site, even on the non-redirected links here: http://gothamlogos.tumblr.com/ Anyone have any experience with projects like this? I've checked read the Moz Tumblr and SEO article from a few years ago, which makes it seem like this should be an SEO "win"... But using the Moz Pro account tools, I'm not seeing any of these non-redirect links (ordinary links) giving any value to anyone on this example site. Thanks so much in advance, Zack
Moz Pro | | Zack2 -
Why did my DA and Links go down?
How could I begin to research this to find out why we have less total links and a lower domain authority. Our DA has gone down two points and our total links dropped by a few thousand. I'd like to find out why that happened but I'm just not sure where to start. Thanks!
Moz Pro | | Sika220 -
A tool to tell a websites estimated traffic
I am new to Moz (as a member), so I am not sure if Moz has a tool that I need. I don't want this post to be about self promotion, so I will keep it short. Our business helps increase conversions and sales for online businesses. Our ideal prospects belongs to some key categories of businesses like ecommerce, saas etc. However, I would like to know the estimated volume of traffic for a website before approaching them and introducing our service. So if there was a tool I could use to estimate the volume of visitors a specific website receives on average a day or month, it would be hugely beneficial.Obviously, these are prospective clients, so we do not have access to their system or their analytics. I just want to get an estimate. So for example, if I entered the domain abc.com into the system, I would hope it could tell me, that abc.com gets an average of 900 unique visitors a day. I don't need too much detail like geographic locations etc, but it would be a bonus having that additional information. I also don't mind paying for a tool that's quality. So it doesn't have to be free.
Moz Pro | | RyanShahed0 -
How you can manipulate your MOZ DA
I have become frustrated at MOZ in the last few months, none of my backlinks have made it into the index. Old back links. Long story short, I figured out the issue and I figured out how anyone can manipulate their DA. I wrote a blog post about it here, http://blog.dh42.com/manipulate-moz/
Moz Pro | | LesleyPaone1 -
Why are inbound links not showing?
I run the site http://www.eurocheapo.com and am finding that many inbound links are not showing up in OSE and on the toolbar. For example, check out this hotel review: http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/hotel/hotel-esmeralda.html In OSE it shows only 2 links (from 1 domain), which is crazy. It has dozens of inbound links from many different domains (links:http://www.eurocheapo.com/paris/hotel/hotel-esmeralda.html). I notice this all over my site. Pages that we link between are also showing no internal links -- which is easy to disprove. Was there a problem with this crawl? Or is the problem in our code? Many thanks for your help, Tom
Moz Pro | | TomNYC0 -
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
