Spam links in spam analyses tool: Referral page doesn't exist anymore
-
Hi,
I have the following problem: The spam analyses tool in MOZ gives me a few links with a spam score of 10 and 9. I want to remove those links and try to contact the webmaster before disavowing the links. I read about being careful with too much disavowing. Unfortunately removing the links isn't possible because three different reasons:
- The page/subdomain of one referring website that should have a link to my website doesn't exist anmymore (compliance.ikkiesvoorverandering.nl/). The website http://ikkiesvoorverandering.nl does exist, but is almost empty and there is no possibility to contact the webmaster. What do you guys recommend to do in this situation? Any experience with this problem?
- On another website (with again no contact option) there is a link who directs to a former website, which has a redirect to my current website. I have no Google search console on that old website anymore. Does that make it impossible to disavow the link? What are other option to remove this link?
- The website that comes up in the spam analyses tool is pretty much empty (http://veensma.jouwbegin.nl/). How can I delete a link from an empty website? Any thoughts?
I hope someone can help me with this, Would be glad to here from you
Lars
-
Hi Lars,
My first questions is whether or not a disavow is strictly necessary. It is absolutely normal for websites to showcase a small amount of spam in their link profile and in many cases I have seen a link profile that is "too clean" merits as much skepticism as a website with spammy links.
The purpose of the tool is to alert you to potentially spammy or harmful links, but this does not mean it is causing your website, rankings or traffic any harm. The first thing I would do would be to determine exactly how problematic this issue is based on your overall link profile rather than focusing your efforts on a few spammy links.
Additionally, it is worth determining whether the links you are referring to are follow or nofollow, since a disavow merely creates nofollow tags instead of removing the links entirely. If they are already nofollow links, then there's no point in conducting a disavow.
If you are dead set on removing them, however, here would be my process for your 3 questions:
-
If the page featuring the link to your page no longer exists, then the link no longer exists. At the very least it is not providing you with any metric-enhancing data and won't have a follow attribute. Nothing to worry about here.
-
This is a disavow situation if you don't have access to Webmaster Console.
-
Same as 1) above - if the page linking to you doesn't exist, then the link doesn't exist. If the page exists and you have no option for removing it or contacting the webmaster, then you have to run the disavow here as well.
Again, I will stress that disavows should be treating as a last-ditch effort when facing a ton of spammy follow links. If you are not meeting these criteria, then it's probably not worth going that route.
Hope this helps - if you have any other info that might help feel free to get in touch and I'll help as best I can.
Cheers,
Rob
-
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 Moz OSE, Ahrefs, Majestic and so on, don't change their user agent while crawling?
Some blackhat websites, PBNs and other "cheaters" are using various methods to effectively block third party backlink checker bots (OSE, Ahrefs, Majestic...) : robot.txt, IP and such. A simple solution for those bots would be to mimic Google by using its user agent string for example.
Link Building | | astronaute
Or if not legally permitted (which I doubt) use some kind of randomness in user agent strings, urls, and IPs in order to prevent blocking. This should not be a big deal IMHO, am I missing something obvious ?0 -
Links from spam sites
Hi! Thank you in advance for your help. Few months ago we suffered a content spam attack. Now, We have discovered that we have imbound links pointing the spam content from external spam and untrusted sites. Could be this affect our ranking? In this case... How can we notify to Google that we refuse these imbound links? Cheers, Luis
Link Building | | delcerro0 -
Are Links/Resources pages considered spam?
I'm dabbling with link building in a non link-happy industry, traffic safety (IE Traffic cones, barricades, safety vests, etc...). We currently are doing #RCS in terms of giveaways for college students as well as discounts in a wider EDU Outreach campaign as well as legitimate guest posting. I have started to use Link Prospector, and got a list of links/resources pages that we can get info from. I found some great links through here, including ways to get links from higher-profile .gov domains, but was wondering if it is worth it to go after the high(er) quality links/resources pages. By higher quality, I usually set a floor of a DA 25-30 and have a limited amount of external links per page. These would be for branded keywords (IE the company name/domain) and not exact match anchor text. I'd really like to see how other SEOs feel about this. Thanks Zachary Russell President, ProTech Internet Group
Link Building | | Zachary_Russell1 -
Domain name holding pages link back, good or bad?
We are a web design and hosting company http://www.spiralsites.com But when we register domains for clients, or they take email only or a name is parked we have it using a holding page which can be seen as follows: http://www.jcevents.co.uk/ is this a good thing? Bad thing? Could it would it should it benefit our rankings? Should we do more to make it look less like our main site and actually try to use it better to help rank our other services pages?
Link Building | | spiralsites0 -
Finding links online that already exist as link juice based on search results
I'm curious about this, I can't find anything on the net that talks about it. I wrote an article about it on squidoo and have had no responses so I am thinking this is very rare subject. The question is I have done some backlink research with my competitors with linkdetective.com and found many links (even follow ones) related to sites that provide search results. Here are a link about what I am talking about as an example, I have found many more besides this one. http://search.lphant.com/es/webResults.html?q=free%20scrabble%20dictionary&hl=en&page=1&src=hmp_es&ref=1 My site appears in those results. When looking at the source there is no "nofollow". I found this page because linkdetective.com had this link listed pointing to my competitor. Are these valid backlinks? What I have been doing is adding these links to http://www.google.com/addurl so that Google knows about them. Is there something I am missing or are these valid?
Link Building | | cbielich0 -
How often does Google crawls old pages, is it worth to get links from them ?
Let's say there's a blog post in my industry niche that's 2 years old. Is it worth to get a link from that blog post ? How do I know Google will actually re-crawl that page, and how long can that process take ?
Link Building | | pqdbr0 -
Will a mega menu on all pages dilute the link juice?
On our web site (http://www.betxpert.com) we have a mega menu with quite a lot of links in it. I am getting warnings in SEOmoz saying we have far to many links in our pages. But a lot of pages have large menus with a lot of links - are all pages punished for this then? My primary question is: Since the menu is on all pages, the pages linked in the menu will have a link in from all of our pages (200K+ pages) and a lot of these do not have a good ranking. So what I want to know is if the pages linked in the menu will have lower ranking because of the many links in - or is this a good thing? Should I consider setting "nofollow" for som of the links on other pages than the homepage (since this is the page with the best rank)?
Link Building | | rasmusbang0 -
Ranking Inner Pages or the Main Page?
Hello Guys, I am relatively new to the SEO world. So I am just wondering what would be more helpful. Getting the homepage ranked for a list of targeted keywords or creating a separate page for each keyword and then getting those pages ranked? Look forward to hear back, Thanks! Naimath
Link Building | | Sizmic0