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
-
If they contain anchor text or are obviously trying to game the system by boosting rankings you definitely want to remove them, but you need to have a good eye for these things. just because spam score is high doesn't always mean its spammy. look into why moz thinks its spammy.
Give it the smell and look test. if it looks fishy, then its fishy.
If you only have your citation listed with a www link you don't have much to worry about.
-
Hi VTMOZ
First of all, remember that the MOZ scores are not used by Google.
All MOZ scores from SPAM score, to PA and DA are arbitrary scores used by MOZ to allow you to compare your website to other websites. Even then they are really only useful when comparing against websites in the same niche.
Yes the scores given by MOZ are useful as a measure to see progress, but I repeat they are not used by Google.
If you have a number of bad backlinks and you think that Google is penalising your rankings because of these links then feel free to disavow them. I would suggest that you make sure you are only going to disavow bad links though.
Again keep in mind that Google seems to be getting better at realising links from certain types of sites are Spammy and ignoring them.
When building backlinks you should always use a natural approach that means your site will gain and lose backlinks at a sustainable rate and you should never pay for backlinks.
I hope this helps
Steve
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
-
Google Algorithm non-manual penalty. How do we fix this (quality?) drop?
Hi, See attached image. We received a non-manual penalty on March 22, 2015. I don't think we ever came out of it. We have moved up due to the Penguin update, but we should (by DA PA) be up on the first page for tons of stuff and most keyword are lower than their true strength. What kind of quality errors could be causing this? I assume it was a quality update. I am working on the errors, but don't see anything that would be so severe as to be penalized. What errors/quality problems am I looking for? We have tons of unique content. Good backlinks. Good design. Good user experience except for some products. Again, what am I looking for? Thanks. non-manual-penalty.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Noindexed Pages with External Links Pointing to it: Does the juice still pass through?
I have a site with many many pages that have very thin content, yet they are useful for users/visitors. Those pages also have many external links pointing to them from reputable and authoritative websites. If i were to noindex/follow these pages, will the juice/value from the external links still pass through just as if the page didn't have the noindex tag? Please let me know!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Dynamic Content Boxes: how to use them without get Duplicate Content Penalty?
Hi everybody, I am starting a project with a travelling website which has some standard category pages like Last Minute, Offers, Destinations, Vacations, Fly + Hotel. Every category has inside a lot of destinations with relative landing pages which will be like: Last Minute New York, Last Minute Paris, Offers New York, Offers Paris, etc. My question is: I am trying to simplify my job thinking about writing some dynamic content boxes for Last Minute, Offers and the other categories, changing only the destination city (Rome, Paris, New York, etc) repeated X types in X different combinations inside the content box. In this way I would simplify a lot my content writing for the principal generic landing pages of each category but I'm worried about getting penalized for Duplicate Content. Do you think my solution could work? If not, what is your suggestion? Is there a rule for categorize a content as duplicate (for example number of same words in a row, ...)? Thanks in advance for your help! A.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | OptimizedGroup0 -
Partial match penalty & Penguin 2.1 smack
Our site is large and allows business owners to post their inventory for sale. We also make websites for those businesses that post their inventory. We link back to the home page of our site from each of those business websites using our domain name as the anchor text. Last summer we got a partial match penalty from Google "Unnatural links to your site—impacts links Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. Some links may be outside of the webmaster’s control, so for this incident we are taking targeted action on the unnatural links instead of on the site’s ranking as a whole. " We investigated and noticed a large amount of links from spammy sites, forum signatures, blog comments, etc. We think we were hit by a negative SEO campaign. We started cleaning up the backlinks and disavowing them. Every reconsideration request since has been denied with more examples of these horrid links. The final reconsideration request gave as examples of how we're violating Google link quality guidelines, our own sites we make for businesses. "_Google has received a reconsideration request from a site owner for domainname.com. We've reviewed the links to your site and we still believe that some of them are outside our quality guidelines." _ So here's the issue I need your advice on. We have tens of thousands of business websites linking back to our main site using our domain name. We're assuming this is the reason Google gave them as examples for violating link quality guidelines. **How can we fix this without losing traffic from removing all those backlinks or make our traffic tank worse than it has? ** Can we replace the domain name with our logo image and still link? Can we nofollow all those links? Can we link not to the home page but to internal pages or sections with no more than 10% of the links, linking to each section? Should we just remove the links and cry?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CFSSEO0 -
Penguin 2.1 Penalty- Can't Understand why hit by it?
Hi, I have lost all my rankings after Penguin 2.1 update. I haven't did anything wrong. Want to know the root cause of the penalty so that I can overcome this. Any help would be appreciated. Website: http://tiny.cc/hfom4w
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | chandman0 -
My site www.sriindustries.com dropped to back page penguin 2.1
My website penguin 2.1 dropped back to page 5 and beyond, can you help me to come out from this ? My head is breaking, also I would like to know how to be on top for local business search (maps)
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | synchronyinfo0 -
Getting a link from an internal page with PR 2 of a domain with PR 5 is how much effective?
My website got a link from an internal page with PR rank of 2 but the domain has the PR rank 5. For example - A domain www.example.com with PR rank 5 and internal page www.example.com/extra/1 PR rank 2. I got a link from the internal page, will I benefit from main domain Page rank 5? Thanks, Sameer
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | KaylaKerr0 -
Can I just delete pages to get rid of bad back-links to those pages?
I just picked up a client who had built a large set of landing pages (1000+) and built a huge amount of spammy links to them (too many to even consider manually requesting deletion for from the respective webmasters). We now think that google may also be seeing the 'landing pages' as 'doorway pages' as there are so many of them 1000+ and they are all optimized for specific keywords and generally pretty low quality. Also, the client received an unnatural links found email from google. I'm going to download the links discovered by google around the date of that email and check out if there are any that look specifily bad but I'm sure it will be just one of the several thosand bad links they built. Anyway, they are now wanting to clean up their act and are considering deleting the landing/doorway pages in a hope to a. rank better for the other non landing/doorway pages (Ie category and sub cats) but more to the crux of my question.. b. essentially get rid of all the 1000s of bad links that were built to those landing/doorway pages. - will this work? if we just remove those pages and use 404 or 410 codes will google see any inbound (external) links to those pages as basicly no longer being links to the site? or is the TLD still likely to be penilized for all the bad links coming into no longer existing URLs on it? Also, any thoughts on whether a 404 or 410 would be better is appreciated. Some info on that here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=64033 I guess another option is the disavow feature with google, but Matt Cutts video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=393nmCYFRtA&feature=em- kind of makes it sound like this should just be used for a few links, not 1000s... Thanks so much!!!!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | zingseo0