What is a "Bad Link" in Google's eyes? Low DA?

[Travis-W]

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

[artdivision]

That happens for 3 reasons

1. It is a low competitive keyword where EMD is very strong. Low profit (around £0,50-0,90 CPC)

2. 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)

3. 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.

[Jonathan1979]

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.

[garfield_disliker]

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

[Travis-W]

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!

[ToddFosterSEO]

Check the anchor texts first, PM me, I just dealt with some really bad negative SEO. I can help you  if you like.

[MikeRoberts]

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?

[Travis-W]

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.

[MikeRoberts]

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]