Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Would you disavow links that have a Moz Spam score of 5?
-
As the question suggests...
-
Spam score can be a useful adjunct when helping you decide which links to disavow, but you should never make a disavow decision based on spam score alone.
The disavow tool should be used by site owners who have a huge problem with unnatural links. If you know that this link is one that you yourself made for SEO purposes alone and that you have lots of links like this, then yes, you should probably disavow it.
But otherwise I wouldn't be too concerned.
-
No problem. I've expanded upon the original answer to clarify what the Spam Score references. This may be useful. (Read from UPDATE: down).
I hope that helps.
-
Thank you!
-
Nope. Moz suggest you don't get too excited about anything below an 8 and even then proceed with caution. Disavowing links is not usually something Google would expect you to need to get involved in, unless you are dealing with thousands of links.
"This [Disavow backlinks] is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."
From: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487
EGOL (who is wise in such matters) references this in a recent Q and A post and says he has never disavowed a single backlink, I've only ever done so once, in a panic and don't see myself doing so again. Much better to concentrate your efforts into countering the spammy links with great content.
UPDATE: Another thing to consider, if you click on Open Site Explorer > Spam Analysis - You'll see a number of these flags are issues you can fix without disavowing links. More often than not, you can fix a few of those. And remember, the Spam Score is not some hard and fast rule that Google follows; they are just a set of signals that Moz believe to have a correlation to Google penalties.
Here's the full list of Spam Flags from OSE > Spam Analysis:
Low MozTrust or MozRank Score
The site link profile is not trustworthy.✓
Large Site with Few Links
We found very few sites linking to this site, considering its size.✓
Site Link Diversity is Low
The diversity of link sources to this subdomain is low.✓
Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Subdomains
The ratio of followed to nofollowed subdomains linking to this subdomain is outside the normal range of others in our index.✓
Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Domains
The ratio of followed to nofollowed domains linking to this subdomain is outside the normal range of others in our index.✓
Small Proportion of Branded Links
Links to this subdomain have low amounts of branded anchor text.✓
Thin Content
A subset of pages within this subdomain have little content.✓
Site Mark-up is Abnormally Small
There's a high ratio of visible text compared to HTML, JavaScript, etc.✓
Large Number of External Links
A subset of pages within this subdomain has a large number of external links.✓
Low Number of Internal Links
Pages crawled on the subdomain have a small number of internal links.✓
Anchor Text Heavy Page
There's a high ratio of anchor text compared to content text.✓
External Links in Navigation
There's a large number of external links within sidebars and footers.✓
No Contact Info
None of the pages crawled contain an email address or links to a social profile.✓
Low Number of Pages Found
Crawl only gets a valid response to a small number of pages.✓
TLD Correlated with Spam Domains
This subdomain is on a top level domain (TLD) extension often found to be the source of spam links.✓
Domain Name Length
This domain name's character count is higher than average.✓
Domain Name Contains Numerals
Domain names including numbers are often found to be the source of spam links.Good luck.
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
-
Is this campaign of spammy links to non-existent pages damaging my site?
My site is built in Wordpress. Somebody has built spammy pharma links to hundreds of non-existent pages. I don't know whether this was inspired by malice or an attempt to inject spammy content. Many of the non-existent pages have the suffix .pptx. These now all return 403s. Example: https://www.101holidays.co.uk/tazalis-10mg.pptx A smaller number of spammy links point to regular non-existent URLs (not ending in .pptx). These are given 302s by Wordpress to my homepage. I've disavowed all domains linking to these URLs. I have not had a manual action or seen a dramatic fall in Google rankings or traffic. The campaign of spammy links appears to be historical and not ongoing. Questions: 1. Do you think these links could be damaging search performance? If so, what can be done? Disavowing each linking domain would be a huge task. 2. Is 403 the best response? Would 404 be better? 3. Any other thoughts or suggestions? Thank you for taking the time to read and consider this question. Mark
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MarkHodson0 -
New Flurry of thousands of bad links from 3 Spammy websites. Disavow?
I also discovered that a website www.prlog.ru put 32 links to my website. It is a russian site. It has a 32% spam score. Is that high? I think I need to disavow. Another spammy website link has spam score of 16% with with several thousand links. I added one link to the site medexplorer.com 6 years ago and it was fine. Now it has thousands of links. Should I disavow all three?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Boodreaux0 -
How many links can you have on sitemap.html
we have a lot of pages that we want to create crawlable paths to. How many links are able to be crawled on 1 page for sitemap.html
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | imjonny0 -
How/Why do I have so many Spam backlinks?
I was looking in GWT yesterday and found we have several thousand "spam" backlinks...I am curious why this happens and how this happens? There are some links from websites/domains that are not mine that appear to be spam. However, we own a large group of domains and have noticed some of the links are coming from 2 of those sites/domains we own to my main site. The sites/domains are not active, we just own them. I am wondering how someone could access these domains that are not active and create spammy backlinks to my main website? (They created about 20,000 links). Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
Internal Links to Ecommerce Category Pages
Hello, I read a while back, and I can't find it now, that you want to add internal links to your main category pages. Does that still apply? If so, for a small site (100 products) what is recommended? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Are link directories still effective? is there a risk?
We've contracted a traditional SEO firm, mostly for link building. As part of their plan they want to submit our site to a large list of link directories, and we're not sure if that's a good option. As far as we know, those directories have been ineffective for a long time now, and we're wondering if there is the chance of getting penalized by google. When I asked the agency their opinion about that, they gave me the following answer - Updated and optimized by us - We are partnered with these sites and control quality of these sites. Unique Class C IP address - Links from unique Referring Class C IP plays a very important role in SEO. Powered by high PR backlinks Domain Authority (DA) Score of over 20 These directories are well categorized. So they actually control those directories themselves, which we think is even worse. I'm wondering what does the Moz community think about link directory submission - is there still something to be gained there, is there any risk involved, etc. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | binpress0 -
Should I Do a Social Bookmarking Campaign and a Tier 2 Linking?
I don't see anything bad in manually creating links on different (about 50) social bookmarking services. Is this method labeled as White Hat? I was wondering if it would be fine to create Tier 2 linking (probably blog comments) for indexing of the social bookmarking links? Please share your thoughts on the topic.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zorsto0 -
Is the SORBS-SPAM list a big deal?
Someone here pointed out that my server ip is on the SORBS-SPAM list and I was wondering if this was a big deal, and how it might have got there, and I would go about getting it off the list?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ayetti0