Spam links and Domain Authority
-
I have a site that I know was Domain Authority 35 but now Domain Authority 25 after someone sent a load of spam links to it, how can this be correct and how can I change it?
Is it worth doing a disavow and will moz take that into account?
-
Hi there,
Sam from Moz's Help Team here - thanks so much for reaching out!
So, a couple of things - when you disavow a link through Google, it doesn't actually remove the link, Google just stops putting SEO weight into it. So our crawler will still find the link. Unfortunately there isn't a way in Link Explorer to "disavow" a link yet so we will still show it.
Disavowing a link doesn't take it away from our tools, so they will still appear as backlinks to your site. 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 with Google:).
I also want to note a couple of things about your DA drop in general - overall, seeing your DA drop is a fairly common problem and can be attributed to a few things:
1.Links we previously discovered are now marked as lost.
2. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more.
3. The links you've earned are from sites that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings.
4. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't).It's a bit difficult to isolate the exact cause of what happened without your own SEO consultant or developer being able to take a dive into this, but you can definitely read more specific information here if you'd like to understand more about the process:).
Something else to note is that on March 5th, we rolled out an entirely new DA calculation method, which affected the DA of many sites. You can read more about this update here https://moz.com/domain-authority-2.0.
Do let us know if we can help with anything else!
-
But does Moz take this into account and Google say here there is no need?
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/gary-illyes-google-penguin-negative-seo-disavows/296609/
-
Moz won't take it into account as, when you use the disavow tool, you send the file directly to Google, so Moz will have no visibility.
Your DA has no direct impact on your ranking, so if you've disavowed the links, I would simply make a note of it and carry on about your business.
In all fairness, Google is pretty good at ignoring that kind of thing now, so unless you've had a manual action (or it was very recent and you're anticipating one) it may not be worth the effort of creating and uploading a disavow file.
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
-
Unsolved Large discrepancy in number of links using compare links tool
Hi there, I’m trying to understand the large discrepancy in number of links among websites. For instance, I am comparing landing pages among two different colleges. One college has over 7 million links, while the other has only 72,000 links. Meanwhile, these colleges are fairly comparable in terms of population and prestige. Could anyone help me understand why this metric is wide ranging, and how a college could have so many links? Specifically looking at total links, internal links, external links, and linking domains.
Link Explorer | | HanoverianHE0 -
Tremendous increase in spam score
What's happening to moz, my spam score is just fluctuating from 1% to 66% now to 67% and back to 66% can't you guys help me reduce my spam score back, why giving me this new stress
Link Explorer | | Dahboss0 -
Moz error with domain and page authority if no www in my domain
Hello, so our domain is website.com and we do not use www in our domain. Now moz shows our page authority as huge (website. Com) and domain authority very low. But our domain is our page that we rank. Is this due to the fact that we use no www and we rank our main index page? Am I correct? Thanks!
Link Explorer | | advertisingcloud0 -
Difference between Link Analysis and open site explorer
Hey, when i check my links in Link Analysis in Moz Analytics is see 45 Linking Root Domains. The manual states: " If you want to look at these pages in more depth, just click the export button. This will take you to Open Site Explorer so you can dig deeper into your link profile and export the data for review later." But when i go there, the open site explorer states i only have 31 Linking Domains. What could explain the difference?
Link Explorer | | RoderickG0 -
Why do links from UCAS to London South Bank University not get reported as external links
Links on the following page at UCAS http://search.ucas.com/provider/1504/london-south-bank-university?Vac=1&AvailableIn=2015&ProviderQuery=london south bank university&ret=providers do not appear to be listed as external links in Open Site Explorer reports. For example there is a link on the UCAS page to http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/schools-departments . But when I check the Open Site Explorer report for http://www.lsbu.ac.uk/schools-departments no link from UCAS is recorded.
Link Explorer | | southbankuni0 -
How to increase number of internal links
Hi all, Using Open Site Explorer and Moz, we're getting only 50 internal links and like to know why. Our site is an online store with a quite good DA (26, see attached files) comparing with competitors, and all pages are in sitemap since several months, and crawled by google. Assuming that we have more than 2000 products in our site, and more of 10000 crawled pages with a link to the home page, we can't understand how "Total internal links" returns only 50. How can we increase internal links? Perhaps we misunderstood the meaning of "Total internal links" in page metrics. What does this value exactly mean? Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance. wuud3Lu RRvn31p
Link Explorer | | citricamente0 -
A simple count (with list if possible) of the external and internal links on a website
Dear Moz Community, I am trying to find a way to easily analyse a website (http://uk.chm-cbd.net) to determine the number of internal and external hyperlinks throughout the (roughly) 490 webpages within the site. It would also be extremely helpful to have a list of all the links with their url. Does anyone know of a tool, methodology to do this? If it requires a lot of programming then that does not help me very much as I am not very computer literate!! So a software to download or an online service would be very helpful. Open Site Explorer seems to be limited, such that I would have to do an analysis on each page within the website. BUT, if anyone knows how I can do using OSE, then please tell me. Thanks in advance to anyone who may be able to help Hugh
Link Explorer | | HLConsulting0 -
Domain Authority Trending Down?
Hi All, Can anyone (preferably a Moz representative) explain why Domain Authority has been trending down on multiple domains? I suspect there is a new index in place? And / Or algo changes? This is making life very difficult for us as our client www.cleanawater.com.au has been working very hard to implement only the whitest of white SEO models.
Link Explorer | | Digital3600