Will Removing or Disavowing Toxic Links Improve MOZ Domain Authority?
-
The vast majority of the 140 domains that link to our website are very low quality directories or and other toxic links. Only about 20-30 domains are not toxic (according to Link Research Tools confirmed by out manual inspection of these links).
Would removing some of these links improve of MOZ Domain Rank? What if we cannot remove them, can NOZ detect a disavow file?
In general would improving the ratio between good quality and poor quality links improve domain authority?
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Lauren:
Do on page factors influence Domain Authority as much as building back links? This is a really key question!
I need to decide whether to invest resources in building back links or improving on site SEO. How about internal links? How much do they contribute to domain authority? At the moment my site lacks internal links, would adding them in a relevant manner improve domain authority?
While I greatly appreciate your last response it is somewhat ambiguous.
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi Again Lauren:
According to Rand Fishkin's post:
https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scoresDomain Authority is predominantly determined by backlinks from other websites rather than on site SEO factors (content quality, internal linking). This contradicts your response somewhat which make things really confusing. Now I don't know whether to allocate resources towards building backlinks from other domains or whether to work on improving internal links and contents.
If you could please clear this up it would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Alan
-
Hi Lauren:
Thanks for your response. I was under the impression that domain authority was solely determined by external backlinks. So, are you saying that domain authority can be increased by improving the internal linking structure between pages and improving the quality of pages?
Our site has many, many "orphan" pages. From what you are saying, improving the internal linking structure would improve our Domain Authority, is that correct?
Also MOZ shows certain title tags, URLs and descriptions as too long, some are duplicate and some missing. Would correcting these help improve domain authority?
Is it safe to say that improved Domain Authority would increase the likely hood of improved ranking?
Thanks,
Alan -
It's worth considering whether you should disavow links if you haven't seen a manual penalty.
We generally only recommend disavowing links in the following situations:- For sites that have made links for SEO purposes on a large scale
- For sites that previously had a manual action for unnatural links
- For sites under obvious negative SEO attacks
If you see some weird links you probably do not need to be disavowing links.
When Google takes action either manually or algorithmically against a site for unnatural linking, it's because the site has been actively trying to manipulate Google rankings on a large scale. If you made a couple of directory links in the past, it's currently unlikely you'll get a penalty.Disavowing a link doesn't take it away so they will still appear as backlinks to your site within the Moz tools. The fact that Google disregards them in relation to your site does not take them off the sites they are on, so best practice is to approach the webmaster first and request the link be removed. If you get no response then disavow.
We always recommend manual investigation of a site to ensure it is a link that is causing harm to your site. When a link is disavowed it can be very difficult to regain that link equity.
To understand how to improve DA (Domain Authority) it can help to get some insight into how we gather our data, which I'll include below. Sorry in advance for the long message!
To calculate DA, we index the web by following links using a crawler. Our crawler is built on a machine-learning based model that is optimized to select pages like those that appear in our collection of Google SERPs. We feed the machine learning model with features of the URL like the backlink counts for the URL and the PLD (pay-level domains), features about the URL like its length and how many subdirectories it has, and features on the quality of the domains linking to the URL and PLD. So, it's not based on any one particular metric, but we're training the crawler to start with high-value links.
In terms of improving your Domain Authority, with the information above in mind, it's best to look at both you on-page SEO to make sure you've covered the basics.
Then you also want to look at your off-site SEO and building more links more links to your site.
There are lots of different areas of Link Building to explore, from patching up broken links, improving your internal link profile, and good ol' fashioned content creation.
Here is a great video by our founder Rand which goes over some easy link building tactics to get you started.You can read more about disavowing links this here: https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin
Sorry for the long response, I hope this helps!
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
-
Links between my two sites
I have a branded site (corporate site) that has links to my blog site. I am trying to locate all the links between the two. Most importantly from the BRANDED site to my BLOG. I've tried the inbound link but it shows I have none. What or how am I searching wrong?
Moz Bar | | Bwaples0 -
Learn how to build links using Fresh Web Explorer: Get your Daily SEO Fix!
This is our second video tutorial for The Moz Daily SEO Fix--tips and tricks with Moz tools in two minutes or less. In today's fix, Michael shows you how to set up an alert in Fresh Web Explorer for anyone who mentions (or links to) your two biggest competitors but not to you. Monitor your inbox for these alerts, and you'll find link new building opportunities ripe for the picking. Watch The Moz Daily SEO Fix: How to Build Links Using Fresh Web Explorer to learn how. To view more videos like this, be sure to check out The Moz Daily SEO Fix playlist on YouTube.
Moz Bar | | kellyjcoop2 -
Keyword research in Moz - Am I missing something?…
I'm fairly new at SEO and am still trying out MOZ. I'm finding myself wishing that Moz had a broader set of tools for keyword research, but am wondering if maybe I'm just missing something. Am I correct in saying that there is no place within Moz that you can get keyword ideas, select/organize keywords, find new/related keywords? I've appreciated the keyword difficulty tool and have played around with Moz Analytics keyword tracking, but these don't help with the broader keyword research aspect. The various tutorials talk about using Google AdWords Keyword Planner and other tools to do that job. But with all that Moz can do, it just seems backwards to do lots of copying-pasting from other tools into Moz, or to have to rely on old excel spreadsheets to organize keywords. It seems that life would be much easier if Moz would be able to pull that kind of external research information in, like Raven does. That way you do most of your research within Moz – allowing you to organize/evaluate potential keywords BEFORE choosing the ones you would like to test for difficulty or track. That way you could simply select the desired keywords and add them to your tracked list. The way it is now, even the one research tool that Moz does have (keyword difficulty) does not allow for an easy way to track or manage a chosen set of keywords. For example, after doing some keyword difficulty analysis, I've chose 5 keywords. To add these 5 to the tracked keywords in a specific campaign I can't just select them and say "track keywords > in xxx campaign". From what I've understood, I must copy-and-paste them into the manage keyword section of the desired campaign. To me this all feels a bit awkward. But since I'm new at this, maybe I'm just missing something? Or maybe it's unrealistic to expect a single tool to address all my SEO needs?
Moz Bar | | Mike_E0 -
Internal Links Count in Crawl Report
My understanding of the 'Internal Links' results in a moz crawl report is that it represents the number of links on the given page that link to other pages on the same site.Assuming this is a correct assumption: We recently ran a crawl report on www.phase1tech.com. Some of the pages are coming back with a large amount of 'internal links'. These 2 pages for example are showing 800 internal links: http://www.phase1tech.com/Upcoming-Events
Moz Bar | | AISEO
http://www.phase1tech.com/Contact Then there are a number of pages coming back with 705 Internal Links, including: http://www.phase1tech.com/Dalsa-CameraLink-Cameras
http://www.phase1tech.com/Hitachi-CameraLink-Cameras At best there are approximately 70-80 links on these pages. Where are these large counts coming from? Is there a means to see what the links being reported on are? At the same time the 'Too Many On-Page Links' indicates 'No' for some pages with a high number of links, and 'Yes' for pages with a low number of links. For example: http://www.phase1tech.com/Baumer-SX-Series
Too Many On-Page Links: Yes
Internal Links: 2
What's up with that?0 -
How to make sense of data for this keyword (Moz Keyword vs. Google KW Planner)
The keyword "auto immune disorder" has an avg monthly (local/US) search of 880 in Google KW Planner with "low" competition In Moz, the same keyword has an avg monthly (local/US) search of 5 with a KW difficulty of 71%. I realize that the competition in Google KWP is based on ads, but is there a discrepancy when the search volume is so different in Google vs. Moz/Bing? Based on the above data, it seems like it would make sense to do a Google Adword (high search volume, low competition) instead of trying to rank organically...am I on the right track here? Thanks!
Moz Bar | | lulu710 -
Delays in Advanced Inbound Links
Is any one experiencing delays in getting their "Advanced Inbound Links" reports ? Mine is running close to 24 hrs and still at 4K links out of 100K
Moz Bar | | Saijo.George0 -
Weird back link showed in moz crawl
Some time ago somebody from this site: http://dianibeach.com created a weird link to our site which had on the end db. Later we have realized that the link was coming from every footer on each page. I believe that the back links from footer does not have realy value and even the more of them the less value. We have asked the guy to remove that links as I thought it might harm our site more then help. Now I I was very surprised to find this link in moz crawl error as second top page on our site in current index??? Can somebody explain how is this possible?? The most ridiculous thing is that when I click on that link it realy opens our site! How is that possible, what is it? This is the link: http://villasdiani.com/?db Thank you very much for any help with this
Moz Bar | | Rebeca10 -
Confusing Moz Crawl?
Hi there, I am not sure if I am missing on something but the moz crawls are rather confusing. After singing in I have received 11 emails with crawls and today I have received again new, When I go to check there to the dashboard it shows 26 pages with issues. When I scroll down I see the pages with issue. Then when I click on the first page listed, to view the issues it says this: Rel Canonical
Moz Bar | | Rebeca1
Using rel=canonical suggests to search engines which URL should be seen as canonical. For this site: http://villasdiani.com/ but we have sorted out the canonical issues a long time ago. Is this a wrong information or is it really true that we do not specify the canonical for our site? Then the second page with issue is there listed http://villasdiani.com/beach-villas/ and it says: Duplicate Page Title
You should use unique titles for your different pages to ensure that they describe each page uniquely and don't compete with each other for keyword relevance. But it does not point out which page is duplicate with this one! I do not have any other page named the same way. It also says in Issues overview 26pages with issues, but it shows on the bottom only 5 under and when I click on view more it brings me to high priority issues where is 0. The most is freaking me out this report: When I click on links, there are listed on the bottom the pages with highest authority among which I found this http://villasdiani.com/db I have never created this kind of page! Funny enough when I click on it it really open that page! How this can be??? In issues overview it also shows on the bottom, right corner 11 page with duplicate content but when I click on it to review it it brings me to high priority issues windows where is not displayed anything Can somebody advice me regarding of this. I have sign up here to learn and sort out the problems with the site but so far I am only getting more confused here. Thank you very much for looking into this.0