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
-
Weird behavior with site's rankings
I have a problem with my site's rankings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mcurius
I rank for higher difficulty (but lower search volume) keywords , but my site gets pushed back for lower difficulty, higher volume keywords, which literally pisses me off. I thought very seriously to start new with a new domain name, cause what ever i do seems that is not working. I will admit that in past (2-3 years ago) i used some of those "seo packages" i had found, but those links which were like no more than 50, are all deleted now, and the domains are disavowed.
The only thing i can think of, is that some how my site got flagged as suspicious or something like that in google. Like 1 month ago, i wrote an article about a topic related with my niche, around a keyword that has difficulty 41%. The search term in 1st page has high authority domains, including a wikipedia page, and i currently rank in the 3rd place. In the other had, i would expect to rank easily for a keyword difficulty of 30-35% but is happening the exact opposite.The pages i try to rank, are not spammy, are checked with moz tools, and also with canirank spam filters. All is good and green. Plus the content of those pages i try to rank have a Content Relevancy Score which varies from 98% to 100%... Your opinion would be very helpful, thank you.0 -
Community Discussion - What's the ROI of "pruning" content from your ecommerce site?
Happy Friday, everyone! 🙂 This week's Community Discussion comes from Monday's blog post by Everett Sizemore. Everett suggests that pruning underperforming product pages and other content from your ecommerce site can provide the greatest ROI a larger site can get in 2016. Do you agree or disagree? While the "pruning" tactic here is suggested for ecommerce and for larger sites, do you think you could implement a similar protocol on your own site with positive results? What would you change? What would you test?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney2 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Why does old "Free" site ranks better than new "Optimized" site?
My client has a "free" site he set-up years ago - www.montclairbariatricsurgery.com (We'll call this the old site) that consistently outranks his current "optimized" (new) website - http://www.njbariatricsurgery.com/ The client doesn't want to get rid of his old site, which is now a competitor, because it ranks so much better. But he's invested so much in the new site with no results. A bit of background: We recently discovered the content on the new site was a direct copy of content on the old site. We had all copy on new site rewritten. This was back in April. The domain of the new site was changed on July 8th from www.Bariatrx.com to what you see now - www.njbariatricsurgery.com. Any insight you can provide would be greatly appreciated!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WhatUpHud0 -
Are clean mobile URL's necessary?
Adding code to redirect/clean up ugly URL's slows down mobile site performance, so it is necessary if we are already using rel=alternate tags on our desktop/www pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | recbrands0 -
When Google's WMT shows thousands of links from a single domain... Should they be removed?
Hi, Looking at Google's WMT "links to your site" it shows few sites that have thousands of links pointing to mine. There are actually only 1-2 links pointing to me from a site that Google shows 2000.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeytzNet
I assume that it is simply because they don't have canonical tags. Should I ask for the 2 links to be removed? Thanks0 -
Rel="prev" and rel="next" implementation
Hi there since I've started using semoz I have a problem with duplicate content so I have implemented on all the pages with pagination rel="prev" and rel="next" in order to reduce the number of errors but i do something wrong and now I can't figure out what it is. the main page url is : alegesanatos.ro/ingrediente/ and for the other pages : alegesanatos.ro/ingrediente/p2/ - for page 2 alegesanatos.ro/ingrediente/p3/ - for page 3 and so on. We've implemented rel="prev" and rel="next" according to google webmaster guidelines without adding canonical tag or base link in the header section and we still get duplicate meta title error messages for this pages. Do you think there is a problem because we create another url for each page instead of adding parameters (?page=2 or ?page=3 ) to the main url alegesanatos.ro/ingrediente?page=2 thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dan_panait0 -
1 of the sites i work on keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page
1 of the sites i work on (www.eva-alexander.com) keeps having its home page "de-indexed" by google every few months, I then apply for a review and they put it back up. But i have no idea why this keeps happening and its only the home page I have no idea why and have never experienced this before
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GMD10