Identifying Bad Domains
-
In the past week my website has not been doing well.
How can I look at a list of domains linking to my website to identify which ones are harmful and need to be removed. Is there a checklist of criteria that a linking doamin to meet for me to remove it?
Thank you for your help.
-
You've gotten some excellent advice already. I'll add a few of my thoughts.
First of all, have you been doing link building? If not, then this may not be the right road to go down. If you've noticed a drop just recently, it may be that the Panda algorithm is affecting your site and Panda really isn't about link quality. There was a big Panda update on May 20 although many sites started seeing changes a couple of days before that.
If you have been doing link building and you want to clean up your links then the goal is to find ones that were self made with the intention of gaming Google and then remove or disavow those. William's list is a good place to start.
-
Even with a tool like Link Detox (which I use and think is great), you'll still need to manually review every site as there will for sure be false positives. You'd probably be better off hiring someone to do this for you than trying it yourself.
-
Thank you for all your responses.
-
You are actually talking about link audits and identifying the bad links from the system. When it comes to link audit there are multiple tools available for it. If you are using Moz.com (Open Site Explorer) will give you the detailed insight of the links that are pointing back to your site. You can try other tools like Majestic SEO and Ahrefs.com for this. It is ideal to use the data of multiple tools like a data combination of GT, Moz.com, Ahrefs.com and Majestic SEO will be mind blowing.
Above tools will only give you the link profile but how to find the bad links out of it is another job. There are two ways here:
- Do it Manually
If you are going to do it manually then you need to set the parameters like which link is bad and which link in the system is worth including in the good list. Try to remove all the bad links and if they does not remove include them in the disavow file and submit it to Google.
- The Tool way!
There are tools like Link Detox and Link Risk that can do this job using their signals to identify a bad link. This is a little costly ideas as these tools are a little on the high end.
Although there are tools available but it is always a better idea to go manually on this as tools can guess wrong so you always have to check the things manually even after get passed by the system.
Hope this helps!
-
There are tools out there you can pay for to do this work for, things like linkdetox.com can be helpful to identify the bad links. Something like Rmoov is great to then begin to removal process.
If doing it on your own, you'll need to check out each questionable domain manually. You can rule out big domains that you know are not spammy, and focus on the ones you have no idea about. When looking at a domain, ask yourself the following:
-
Is this site indexed in Google?
-
Could I easily create a followed link from this domain to mine? OR pay for one?
-
Does this site seem to be scraping information of mine from other sources?
-
Is this site in English (or whichever language your site is in)?
-
Is it a crappy directory site? Article submission site? Other easily exploitable kind of site?
These are the sorts of things to look out for. Google doesn't want to count links for you if you made them for SEO purposes, or paid someone else to. If you look at a site, and it appears that their business model is building links, or they are spammy in anyway, you know it's a red flag.
Also, I'm learning more and more that when you're on the fence about a domain, disavow it.
-
-
Do a site:www.examplesite.com search in Google. This will show if Google has penalized them. Also you can run them all through SEMrush and see if they have been hit by Google, you can Identify that by their drop in organic traffic. That's two of many way to do the research.
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
-
Why has a .cleaning domain not been indexed on Google?
One of our clients domain names is http://companyname.cleaning I've done all of the on-page SEO, submitted a sitemap to Google and am currently monitoring the analytics and data on MozPro. The next scheduled update on domain authority is the 21st of July? We must have had this on since April, the website was most likely launched at the end of March. Is it normal to wait this long for a site to be indexed and the domain authority to rise?
Moz Pro | | birdmarketing0 -
URL, Subdomain and Root Domain Structure
Various URL Structure
Moz Pro | | Mark_Ch
mydomain.co.uk
www.mydomain.co.uk
http://www.mydomain.co.uk
http://mydomain.co.uk
mydomain.co.uk/index.html
www.mydomain.co.uk/index.html
http://www.mydomain.co.uk/index.html
http://mydomain.co.uk/index.html HTACCESS File Index Rewrite RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mydomain.co.uk/ [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.mydomain.co.uk/$1/ [R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^mydomain.co.uk
RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.mydomain.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] Google WMT Setting: Configuration | Settings
Preferred domain: radio check on "don't set a preferred domain" SEOMoz Open Site Explorer
mydomain.co.uk - (301 Redirect) [No Data] PA38 DA30
http://www.mydomain.co.uk/index.html - (301 Redirect) [No Data] PA23 DA30 Majestic Site Explorer
Number of Referring Domains & External Backlinks vary between the following instances:
URL: http://www.mydomain.co.uk
SUBDOMAIN: www.mydomain.co.uk
ROOT DOMAIN: mydomain.co.uk
Question
I have set up my htaccess file to rewrite "Various URL Structure" to www.mydomain.co.uk. However when i view metrics in Majestic SEO, the url / Subdomain / Root Domain all differ. Why is this happening?
Is this harming my site?
What is common practice when defining URL Structure? Any other quality advise and implementation structure would be much appreciated. Regards Mark0 -
Why do the competitive link analysis numbers not match the domain analysis?
There is only one area that our competitor out ranks us and that is in the total links on the root domain. But when i go to competitive link analysis we have more links then they do. Any ideas?
Moz Pro | | d_friess0 -
Linking Building: Do I have to beat Linking Root Domains or Total Links?
Hello, When skoping for how to beat competitors, do I need to aim to beat the linking root domains number or the total links? Or do I need to think about both? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | BobGW0 -
How to Calculate % improvement in Mozrank and Domain Authority
I understand the concept that mozrank and Domain Authority are measured on a logarithmic scale . http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank I'm trying to determine the percentage improvement in the Logrithmic value. For example Original Domain Authority 60 Original Mozrank 5 End Domain Authority 63 End Mozrank 6. So 5% change in DA and 20% change in MozRank. How do we convert these numbers to the real logrithmic change?
Moz Pro | | webbroi0 -
Were do I find the old Link Scape report that shows Domain Juice passed?
It looks like they are retiring the old Link scape. Where do we find the report that showed the Domain Juice passed by each link? Is it in the advanced reports and we need to request and wait?
Moz Pro | | MBayes0 -
How do I change my domain?
My domain was updated to use www by default. How do I update it in the profile?
Moz Pro | | dsfsystemsseo0