Potential spam websites with high DA linking back to us

[MEllsworth]

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?

For example:
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=busca.starmedia.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score

and

https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=cc879fe.activerain.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score

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

[MEllsworth]

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:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oG3mxJnA8Zk

[Dr-Pete]

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 links

For 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.

[MEllsworth]

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

[Dr-Pete]

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).

[Coolguyry]

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