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
-
Pagination and View All Pages Question. We currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to View all as I don't believe it's a good user experience so how best we deal with this.
Hello All, I have an eCommerce site and have implemented the use rel="prev" and rel="next" for Page Pagination. However, we also have a View All which shows all the products but we currently don't have a canonical tag pointing to this as I don't believe showing the user a page with shed loads of products on it is actually a good user experience so we havent done anything with this page. I have a sample url from one of our categories which may help - http://goo.gl/9LPDOZ This is obviously causing me duplication issues as well . Also , the main category pages has historically been the pages which ranks better as opposed to Page 2, Page 3 etc etc. I am wondering what I should do about the View All Page and has anyone else had this same issue and how did they deal with it. Do we just get rid of the View All even though Google says it prefers you to have it ? I also want to concentrate my link juice on the main category pages as opposed being diluted between all my paginated pages ? - Does anyone have any tips on how to best do this and have you seen any ranking improvement from this ? Any ideas greatly appreciated. thanks Peter
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PeteC120 -
"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 -
Getting Google in index but display "parent" pages..
Greetings esteemed SEO experts - I'm hunting for advice: We operate an accommodation listings website. We monetize by listing position in search results, i.e. you pay more to get higher placing in the page. Because of this, while we want individual detailed listing pages to be indexed to get the value of the content, we don't really want them appearing in Google search results. We ideally want the "content value" to be attributed to the parent page - and google to display this as the link in the search results instead of the individual listing. Any ideas on how to achieve this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AABAB0 -
Does Google WMT download links button give me all the links they count
Hi Different people are telling me different things I think if I download "all links" using the button in WMT to excel, I am seeing all the links Google is 'counting' when evaluating my site. is that right?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | usedcarexpert0 -
Affiliate Links Added and Site Dropped in only Google
My site was dropshipping a product and we switched to an affiliate offer. We had three 4 links to different affiliate products. Our site dropped the next day. I have been number 1 for 6 months, has a pr 6 and is 2 years old. It has been 2 weeks and the site hasn't jumped back. Any suggestions on how to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | dkash0 -
Nofollow links in Google Webmaster
I've noticed nofollow links showing up in my Google Webmaster tools "links to your site" list. If they are nofollow why are they showing up here? Do nofollow links still count as a backlink and transfer PR and authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NoCoGuru1 -
How long a domain's bad reputation last?
I catched a dropped domain with a nice keyword, but poor reputation. It used to have some malware on the site and WOT (site review tool available at Chrome among others) has very negative reviews tied to the site. I guess that Google has to have records about that as well, because Chrome used to prompt a warning when I entered the site. My question is: how long will the bad reputation last if I build a legitimate website there?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | zapalka0