Disavow wn.com?
-
I am cleaning up some spammy backlinks for a client and will be submitting a disavow at Google.
This particular company website has 2,000+ backlinks from the domain wn.com which appears to be "World News". If you go to it, it appears to be nothing more than scraped content from other sites.
Here is a recent example, where my client is linked to (I don't even see the backlink on the page, but it is in the source code!):
http://article.wn.com/view/2013/11/22/Hungarian_Woman_Sentenced_to_One_Year_in_Prison_for_Her_Role/#/related_newsBut when I look at Moz metrics, WN.com has a domain authority of 90! So I don't want to disavow something that could POTENTIALLY be helping us.
The client's website gets zero traffic from wn.com and I've never seen my client linked to in anything worthwhile... it kinda looks spammy to me.
If you were me, after looking at WN.com and taking everything into account... would you disavow it?
This client really needs to create a healthier backlink profile.
Thanks!
-
Good point by Kevin, too, that it does depend on the rest of your link profile and how solid it is. If you have thousands of linking root domains, just one domain isn't going to make or break you. Your overall profile is the key.
-
First, to Kevin's question, a high DA doesn't mean a site isn't spammy. It means the site has a lot of seemingly high-authority links (or just a large link profile from generally large sites, or a healthy mix). Some of the modelling controls for quality, but not necessarily spam factor - which is something we're actively working on.
I suspect the "articles." sub-domain carries less authority than the overall root domain, but it's tough to say. With so many links, you're probably getting some credit from the root domain.
Unfortunately, the weight of any one link or even 2,000 links from one domain is almost impossible to measure. So, it comes down to a risk/reward scenario. Are you just proactively cleaning things up, or are you fighting a serious fire, like an outright penalty that's killing traffic? If you're being proactive, I'd probably leave this alone, especially if you have solicited these links, paid for them, etc. If you're fighting a serious penalty, then you need to risk cutting deep, especially if you're doing a Penguin recovery.
-
I'm interested in this as well. I'm pretty new to this, but here are my comments/questions.
-
Does a high DA from Moz automatically mean that the site is not perceived as spammy by Google's index? I'm not sure about this. I've seen some pretty spammy looking directories pull up a high Domain Authority in the MozBar, but this could be because of the site's size, number of outbound links, and other metrics.
-
Have you determined whether there is any way to have the links removed by contacting the directory? From what I can see, Google recommends that we exhaust all possibilities for link removal before using the disavow tool, although in my experience it's not easy to contact anyone who "controls" these spammy directories.
-
Do you have a stockpile of legitimate, authoritative links from reputable domains built up to offset the link removal? This should hopefully soften the blow if in fact you end up suffering any ranking penalty from having the link disavowed.
-
Would it make sense to concentrate on building other reputable links before calling attention to links that are potentially spammy? Is it rocking the boat by disavowing a link to what seems like an authoritative site (at least as far as Moz is concerned) before having a solid foundation of reputable links? If that is the case, I'd focus my attention the other way: build the foundation first, then weed out the suspect links. But that's my opinion, I may be wrong. Very interested to see what other community members have to say about this!
-
-
I've found WN before and thought it looked quite good due to the domain authority. However, like you say, it's just a scraper.
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
-
Can the disavow tool INCREASE rankings?
Hi Mozzers, I have a new client who has some bad links in their profile that are spammy and should be disavowed. They rank on the first page for some longer tail keywords. However, we're aiming at shorter, well-known keywords where they aren't ranking. Will the disavow tool, alone, have the ability to increase rankings (assuming on-site / off-site signals are better than competition)? Thanks, Cole
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ColeLusby0 -
Feedback on prleads.com
Hello Just wondering if anyone has ever tried prleads.com (It's like a huge PR network) It looks a bit too good to be true. But never know
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AymanH0 -
Have just submitted Disavow file to Google: Shall I wait until after they have removed bad links to start new content lead SEO campaign?
Hi guys, I am currently conducting some SEO work for a client. Their previous SEO company had built a lot of low quality/spam links to their site and as a result their rankings and traffic have dropped dramatically. I have analysed their current link profile, and have submitted the spammiest domains to Google via the Disavow tool. The question I had was.. Do I wait until Google removes the spam links that I have submitted, and then start the new content based SEO campaign. Or would it be okay to start the content based SEO campaign now, even though the current spam links havent been removed yet.. Look forward to your replies on this...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | sanj50500 -
Changes to SEO with disavow?
Has the game changed a lot with the disavow tool I can see people still saying check out what our competitors are doing but with just going through a disavow myself how do you actually know what the correct link diversity is as 0 - 100% of the links could be disavowed. Also could a competitor not just buy a load of spammy links and disavow them to mask there real links. (I know in my backlinks on 150 are good and the rest is disavowed crap)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Advice on using the disavow tool to remove hacked website links
Hey Everyone, Back in December, our website suffered an attack which created links to other hacked webistes which anchor text such as "This is an excellent time to discuss symptoms, fa" "Open to members of the nursing/paramedical profes" "The organs in the female reproductive system incl" The links were only visible when looking at the Cache of the page. We got these links removed and removed all traces of the attack such as pages which were created in their own directory on our server 3 months later I'm finding websites linking to us with similar anchor text to the ones above, however they're linking to the pages that were created on our server when we were attacked and they've been removed. So one of my questions is does this effect our site? We've seen some of our best performing keywords drop over the last few months and I have a feeling it's due to these spammy links. Here's a website that links to us <colgroup><col width="751"></colgroup>
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | blagger
| http://www.fashion-game.com/extreme/blog/page-9 | If you do view source or look at the cached version then you'll find a link right at the bottom left corner. We have 268 of these links from 200 domains. Contacting these sites to have these links removed would be a very long process as most of them probably have no idea that those links even exist and I don't have the time to explain to each one how to remove the hacked files etc. I've been looking at using the Google Disavow tool to solve this problem but I'm not sure if it's a good idea or not. We haven't had any warnings from Google about our site being spam or having too many spam links, so do we need to use the tool? Any advice would be very much appreciated. Let me know if you require more details about our problem. <colgroup><col width="355"></colgroup>
| | | |0