Backlink quality vs quantity: Should I keep spammy backlinks?
-
Regarding backlinks, I'm wondering which is more advantageous for domain authority and Google reputation:
- Option 1: More backlinks including a lot of spammy links
- Option 2: Fewer backlinks but only reliable, non-spam links
I've researched this topic around the web a bit and understand that the answer is somewhere in the middle, but given my site's specific backlink volume, the answer might lean one way or the other.
For context, my site has a spam score of 2%, and when I did a quick backlink audit, roughly 20% are ones I want to disavow. However, I don't want to eliminate so many backlinks that my DA goes down. As always, we are working to build quality backlinks, but I'm interested in whether eliminating 20% of backlinks will hurt my DA.
Thank you!
-
Backlinks are always about quality not quantity. Google does not like too many backlinks and especially spammy backlinks. I would suggest you to go with quality backlinks if you want long term and sustainable results otherwise there will always be a threat of getting penalized by google if you focus on spammy backlinks.
-
It's a myth that your DA drops because you put links in disavow. Disavow is a google only (or bing) tool, where lets say you get spammy links from a rogue domain and there's no way you can get 'm removed.
MOZ cant read your disavow file either you file into google. So i'm not sure on how the link is being put here. With MOZ, or any other tool, they just calculate the amount of incoming, FOLLOW links and presume your DA on some magical number. Thats all there is to it. Again, PA/DA has nothing in common at all with Google as Google maintains their own algorithm.
-
Hello again,
Thanks for the clarification and the link. I've read through that and a few other sources across the web, but none of them seemed to answer my question the way you did, so thanks! Our backlink profile is pretty balanced with spammy and definitely not spammy, so I'm not super concerned about it, but I appreciate the reminder.
-
I should also clarify, these may hurt you if they are your only links. If you have very little equitable links, this may cause Google and other search engines to falsely recognize you as spam. So just be careful and be on the look out for extra suspicious spam links. The balanced approach is the best approach: don't worry but stay aware!
Here is a more technical write-up from Moz that I reccomend: https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score
-
No problem Liana.
- That is correct. Google understands that you don't have control of 3rd party sites, so instead of penalizing you, they minimize/ delete the effect the spam site links have.
- Yes, but only kind of. It may or may not increase PA/ DA, but according to Google it shouldn't hurt you.
But yeah that's the gist of it! Instead taking the time investigating and disavowing links, you could spend that time cultivating relationships with other websites and businesses that could give you nice quality linkage.
Hope this answer works for you.
-
Hello Advanced Air Ambulance SEO!
Thanks for the quick and thorough response. Please confirm if I understand you correctly:
- I can leave spammy backlinks alone (not spend time disavowing them) _unless _I see a manual action in Search Console, which would indicate that Google sees an issue and is penalizing my site until I disavow the links. Without this manual action, there's no indication that the spam links are hurting my rankings or DA.
- Leaving spammy backlinks that don't incur a manual action may actually increase DA since leaving them maintains a higher volume of backlinks (albeit some spammy), and backlink quantity is a contributor to DA.
Thank you!
-
Hi Liana,
As far as spammy links, Google has done well detecting whether or not they are intentional, aka black hat. If they aren't, Google does not penalize you for these links, so it's best to leave them.
As far as a strategy for generating links to your website, you should always focus on high quality over quantity. High quality links give you exponentially more return than high quantity of bad links.
I recommend this article Google wrote for us to understand when and how to disavow links.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
In short, rarely do you ever need to disavow links, even if they have a high spam score. You are only hurt when they sense you are gaming the system and in the case that they detect or suspect unethical backlinking, you will be penalized with a "manual action". You can check if you were penalized, as well as disavow flagged backlinks, in the Google Search Console.
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
-
Cloudflare shared SSL certificate vs Letsencrypt
Cloudflare does have a free SSL certificate, which is shared among many domains (in my case 30+ domains). An alternative would be to use letsencrypt and generate a dedicated certificate. Can a shared SSL certificate hurt my google ranking?
Technical SEO | | danielbeck0 -
Spanish United States Vs Puerto Rico Hreflang
Hey Moz, So we are trying to figure out weather it is the same if we have Hreflang for "US-ES" vs "US-PR", IF we do "US-PR" for Puerto Rico for its own links we then have to create 3 parts to our site, PR Spanish PR English US Spanish We looked at Apple as an example and they had a "Latin America" for their Hreflang and labeled everything has either "es-419" is that the same concept as having just "us-es" for Puerto Rico? ( see attached screenshot ) We are trying to figure out what would be more effective and weather or not "US-ES" search results will appear for Puerto Rico also. PZVwg16
Technical SEO | | uBreakiFix0 -
Anything new if determining how many of a sites pages are in Google's supplemental index vs the main index?
Since site:mysite.com *** -sljktf stopped working to find pages in the supplemental index several years ago has anyone found another way to identify content that has been regulated to the supplemental index?
Technical SEO | | SEMPassion0 -
Links from PubMed (nlm.nih.gov) not appearing in backlinks for articles
Content from our medical journals gets indexed by the National Library of Medicine / PubMed on a monthly basis. The link to the full article appears in the upper-right corner on PubMed, yet I'm unable to find PubMed (nlm.nih.gov) backlinks in the reporting tools. Example:
Technical SEO | | aafpitadmin
Article Title: Respiratory Syncytial Virus Infection in Children (allintitle query)
Article URL: http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html
PubMed URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21243988 The PubMed link is to http://www.aafp.org/link_out?pmid=21243988 ,
a 301 redirect to the article, http://www.aafp.org/afp/2011/0115/p141.html Any idea why this link isn't appearing in backlinks? This isn't just for one article, we have roughly 2,000 articles from 1998 to the present. Articles from the past 12-months are access-restricted, and after 12-months the articles become public.0 -
Will Links to one Sub-Domain on a Site hurt a different Sub-Domain on the same site by affecting the Quality of the Root Domain?
Hi, I work for a SaaS company which uses two different subdomains on our site. A public for our main site (which we want to rank in SERPs for), and a secure subdomain, which is the portal for our customers to access our services (which we don't want to rank for) . Recently I realized that by using our product, our customers are creating large amounts of low quality links to our secure subdomain and I'm concerned that this might affect our public subdomain by bringing down the overall Authority of our root domain. Is this a legitimate concern? Has anyone ever worked through a similar situation? any help is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | ifbyphone0 -
Why use noindex, follow vs rel next/prev
Look at what www.shutterstock.com/cat-26p3-Abstract.html does with their search results page 3 for 'Abstract' - same for page 2-N in the paginated series. | name="robots" content="NOINDEX, FOLLOW"> |
Technical SEO | | jrjames83
| | Why is this a better alternative then using the next/prev, per Google's official statement on pagination? http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663744 Which doesn't even mention this as an option. Any ideas? Does this improve the odds of the first page in the paginated series ranking for the target term? There can't be a 'view all page' because there are simply too many items. Jeff0 -
My backlinks do not register on your software but are registered on my google webmaster tools
Why are my back links not being recognized by any software other than google webmaster?
Technical SEO | | SteveK640 -
Blog archives vs individual articles
In a client's blog, you can find each individual article pages as well as aggregate of articles per month or sometimes per day (including each entire article). The problem is that the article appears twice, once in a dedicated page (article page) and once with other articles (in the archive). Is there a specific SEO approach to this type of situation? Is there duplicate content? What page name should I give each archive (if at all), as there are quite a few? Thank you
Technical SEO | | DavidSpivac0