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
-
Moz spam score 16 for some pages - Never a manual penalty: Disavow needed?
Hi community, We have some top hierarchy pages with spam score 16 as per Moz due to the backlinks with very high spam score. I read that we could ignore as long as we are not employing paid links or never got a manual penalty. Still we wanna give a try by disavowing certain domains to check if this helps. Anyway we are not going to loose any backlink score by rejecting this low-quality backlinks. Can we proceed? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
No cache still a good link for disavow?
Hi Yall, 2 scenarios: 1. I'm on the border line of disavowing some websites that link to me. If the page is N/A (not available) for the cache, does that mean i should disavow them? 2. What if the particular page was really good content and the webmaster just has the worse seo skills in not interlinking his old blogs, hence why the page that's linking to me is N/A for cache, should i still disavow it? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Shawn1240 -
The differences between XXX.domain.com and domain.com/XXX?
hi guys i would like to know which seo value is better? for example if i would put a link in xxx.domain.com or domain.com/XXX which one will give me a better seo value? does it give the same? assuming that domain.com have a huge PR RANK itself. why do people bother making XXX.domain.com instead? hope for clarification thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | andzon0 -
I Mistakenly uploaded Disavow File to Non WWW version of Webiste in Webmaster Tools...is this a Problem???
Hey guys and gals, I need some advice on this please. I recently had someone perform a negative S.E.O campaign on my site and I was inundated with 13,000 + spammy links pointing to my website and I had to perform a Disavow in Google Webmaster Tools but for some reason, it is showing that I uploaded the Disavow text file to the Non WWW version of the website but the WWW version of my website is the preferred domain and I have all NON WWW queries being 301 redirected to www.pcmedicsoncall.com My question is should I correct this and upload the Disavow text to the preferred domain in Google Webmaster Tools??? Please advise on how I should proceed with this situation.... Thank you. Cam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CamMcArthur0 -
Is this negative SEO? Should I disavow these links?
We have been doing our own internal link building for the last year and getting nice backlinks. As of the last few days, ahrefs is showing a lot of new links that seem very spammy. We have not hired anyone to do link building for us, and these are all being created on these sites under the same user name. There is a good amount of them popping up, and I fear we will be subjected to a google pentalty for unnatural links if its not addressed. My first question is, am I correct thinking this is negative seo, and not some random sites that picked up our content and is going across their affiliate websites? If so, then should I preemptively disavow all these links? Are there any good ways to stop this? How can I track who is placing these garbage links? Here are some examples of these bad links. I know I can find the webmaster via a whois but I think that really wont get me anywhere, but I could be wrong. Here are some examples of the links that started popping up yesterday and today. http://pligg-cms.info/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-relief
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DemiGR
http://www.sharklinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://factson37.com/story.php?title=student-loan-debt-forgiveness-website
http://social-marker.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-debt-forgiveness
http://makingbookmarks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://bookmarkingforseo.com/story.php?title=top-student-loan-consolidation-options
http://jadelinks.info/story.php?title=-student-loan-consolidation-options There are quite a bit more and they don't seem to be stopping. All of them look pretty much identical to this. Thoughts?1 -
Should I Disavow More Links
My SEO website got hit with a very severe penalty about a year ago and it was totally banished from the rankings for all of the money terms like SEO, SEO company and search engine optimisation (before the penalty I ranked in the top 10-15 for all of those phrases, top 3 for SEO company). I was probably hit for being listed in shed loads of paid directories, low quality free directories, footer links in client sites, keyword forum signature links and articles with keyword rich text links. A month or so after I got hit I started trying to clean up my link profile, I got rid of all of the client website links, I changed the link text on the majority of forum signature links and article links, I managed to get rid of about 50 directory links and the ones that I could not get taken down I disavowed - about 150. During that time I sent 2-3 separate reconsideration requests and I got this message each time: "Links to your site violate Google's quality guidelines" After doing all of that work and being rejected I pretty much gave up - things just seemed to get worst, not only was I no longer ranking for the money terms, but all of my blog posts tanked as well. I got my site redesigned and switched to Wordpress - I used 301 redirects and everything but they totally didn't work. My organic traffic went down to less than 50 hits a day - before the penalty I was getting over 300 a day. Then on Saturday just gone, almost exactly a year after I got hit with the penalty I noticed my site ranking in position 23 on Google.co.uk in the UK for the competitive phrase SEO company from being absolutely nowhere and I do mean nowhere. This sign has given me hope and the motivation to get rid of the penalty altogether, update all of my articles, get rid of bad advice in old blog posts and get rid of the rest of the bad links. Thing is that I am nervous to go getting rid of more links and disavowing, what if I do more harm then good? Do you think the penalty has been removed and I should just leave the rest of the bad links or should I continue trying to clean things up? By the way, my website is http://www.seoco.co.uk
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Eavesy1 -
To Disavow or Not to Disavow - that is the Question!
I have had two SEO 'specialists' look at my site after the 2012 Penguin update as I was hit badly for one very important keyword. I took off any bad sites links but I never did anything with inbound links. One says my link profile is fine and do NOT use the disavow tool but I should improve my site (landing pages, content, photos, put blog on site, articles, social media etc etc). This I tried for several months but my site never improved. the second 'expert' said I HAVE to take certain ones off and he identified inbound links from spammy sites. He found links from 65 links from malware/untrusted sites and 267 from spam articles and 124 from link farms plus hundreds more from pages that no longer exist or never provide traffic What would you do? i should point out the anchor text for these inbound links is the one keyword that is the most important to the site and the one that got hit by the Penguin 2012
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Llanero0 -
Can i send a disavow if a detect a spam link
I have detected than one web domain is generating 2400 links to my site should a use a disavow tools, as it is imposible to have contact from webmaster and no response to your emails My web as not been warned or penalized, but i dont like this link, and i want to inform google of that,. If google acepts the disavow file, should i still see on my webmaster tools that web links, or will they desapear thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0