Spammy inbound links: Don't Fix It If It's Not Broken?
-
Hi Moz community,
Our website is nearing the end of a big redesign to be mobile-responsive. We decided to delay any major changes to text content so that if we do suffer a rankings drop upon launch, we'll have some ability to isolate the cause.
In the meantime I'm analyzing our current SEO strengths and weaknesses. There is a huge discrepancy between our rankings and our inbound link profile. Specifically, we do great on most of our targeted keywords and in fact had a decent surge in recent months. But Link Profiler turned up hundreds of pages of inbound links from spammy domains, many of which don't even display a webpage when I click there. (shown in uploaded image)
"Don't fix it if it's not broken" is conflicting with my natural repulsion to these sorts of referrals. Assuming we don't suffer a rankings drop from the redesign, how much of a priority should this be? There are too many and most are too spammy to contact the webmasters, so we'll need to do it through a Disavow. I couldn't even open the one at the top of the list because our business web proxy identified it as adult content.
It seems like a common conception is that if Google hasn't penalized us for it yet, they will eventually. Are we talking about the algorithm just stumbling upon these links and hurting us or would this be something we would find in Manual Actions? (or both?)
How long after the launch should we wait before attacking these bad links? Is there a certain spam score that you'd say is a threshold for "Yes, definitely get rid of it"? And when we do, should we Disavow domains one domain at a time to monitor any potential drops or all at once? (this seems kind of obvious but if the spam score and domain authority alone is enough of a signal that it won't hurt us, we'd rather get it done asap)
How important is this compared to creating fresh new content on all the product pages? Each one will have new images as well as product reviews, but the product descriptions will be the same ones we've had up for years. I have new content written but it's delayed pending any fallout from the redesign.
Thanks for any help with this!
-
Can share your domain?
-
Thanks, I think I started checking that out but will go back and complete it.
We haven't built any PBNs but we do have an affiliate marketing program through Commission Junction and have found poor quality links as a result of that in the past so there's a likely culprit for some. We also have a direct competitor in the same state who knows digital marketing well, so it's possible they've tried to sabotage our link profile a bit.
-
I will expand on this but don’t do a disavow (unless google told you to disavow or you made them using a PBN) it’s not going to help you ask them to remove the bad links google is most likely ignoring.
I will explain more in 4-6 hours.
search moz for the most recent WBF ab this Cyrus does an awesome job of explaining why.
hope this helps,
Tom
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
-
When Should I Ignore Moz's Report Canonical Missing?
I'm dealing with an eCommerce website which has a category, subcategory, products. Moz is showing all of these and the individual products as missing a canonical. The site is very thin on content at the moment, but all the pages are clearly different, and I don't see why they need a canonical unless this is some rule that eCommerce sites have to follow. Should I ignore Moz's missing canonical report? My understanding is if the product appears in multiple categories, then a canonical should be put in place to the product. Any advice would be appreciated. Christina
Moz Pro | | ChristinaRadisic0 -
Why doesn't Moz crawl whole pages of our website to report All On-Page issues?
Hi friends & mozzers, How can't Moz crawl whole pages of our website: https://www.4atvtires.com/ to report All Serious On-Page issues. We have more than 15000 product pages. And how could it be possible that Moz isn't able to crawl whole, just got crawl report upto 258 pages of our website, and also I can experience the same in Google webmaster ?? Please help to fix this issue as early as possible. Regards,
Moz Pro | | BigSlate
Rann0 -
Links from Dofollow sites are Nofollow ?
Hii i have made few links from dofollow site through blog commenting method and when i checked my site on Open Site Explorer it shows Nofollow . So my question is links from Dofollow blogs will be nofollow ? There is any benefit of getting links from dofollow site through comments ? Thanks
Moz Pro | | sumit40 -
Warnings, Notices, and Errors- don't know how to correct these
I have been watching my Notices, Warnings and Errors increase since I added a blog to our WordPress site. Is this effecting our SEO? We now have the following: 2 4XX errors. 1 is for a page that we changed the title and nav for in mid March. And one for a page we removed. The nav on the site is working as far as I can see. This seems like a cache issue, but who knows? 20 warnings for “missing meta description tag”. These are all blog archive and author pages. Some have resulted from pagination and are “Part 2, Part 3, Part 4” etc. Others are the first page for authors. And there is one called “new page” that I can’t locate in our Pages admin and have no idea what it is. 5 warnings for “title element too long”. These are also archive pages that have the blog name and so are pages I can’t access through the admin to control page title plus “part 2’s and so on. 71 Notices for “Rel Cononical”. The rel cononicals are all being generated automatically and are for pages of all sorts. Some are for a content pages within the site, a bunch are blog posts, and archive pages for date, blog category and pagination archive pages 6 are 301’s. These are split between blog pagination, author and a couple of site content pages- contact and portfolio. Can’t imagine why these are here. 8 meta-robot nofollow. These are blog articles but only some of the posts. Don’t know why we are generating this for some and not all. And half of them are for the exact same page so there are really only 4 originals on this list. The others are dupes. 8 Blocked my meta-robots. And are also for the same 4 blog posts but duplicated twice each. We use All in One SEO. There is an option to use noindex for archives, categories that I do not have enabled. And also to autogenerate descriptions which I do not have enabled. I wasn’t concerned about these at first, but I read these (below) questions yesterday, and think I'd better do something as these are mounting up. I’m wondering if I should be asking our team for some code changes but not sure what exactly would be best. http://www.seomoz.org/q/pages-i-dont-want-customers-to-see http://www.robotstxt.org/meta.html Our site is http://www.fateyes.com Thanks so much for any assistance on this!
Moz Pro | | gfiedel0 -
Too many on-page links
one of my SEOmoz pro campaigns has given me the warning: Too many on-page links and the page in question is my html sitemap. How do i resolve this because I obviously need my sitemap. How do i get around this?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice1 -
Reg. internal followed links
Our site is new. So far we have a 534 pages. Our competitors have around 5000. I'm working on building more, but that's a lot of catching up. The report says we have only 174 internal followed links. Why is that? I have all links set in the site to be nofollow links, but not the inside links. I also have lots of landing pages, which are not added to the main menu, obviously. But the the main menu shows up on all landing pages. Just wondering if either the nofollow has anything to do with it or the landing pages set up, or the numbers are accurate. Any ideas? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | FinanceSite0 -
What's with the new Q&A set up?
In the old Q&A set up your response was automatically given a thumbs up by you so that you got a mozpoint for every response you gave. Now you have to manually thumb up your responses. Why was this change made? Can we get it back to the way it was?
Moz Pro | | DanDeceuster1 -
Why am I not seeing an increase in external followed links?
Ive been getting some really good links pointing to my domain as of lately, and they appear to be followed links. yet the number of external followed links shown in my seomoz tool bar does not want to budge! nor do these links show up in site explorer! Is there a delay in the toolbars response-time? or could it be something else? Thanks
Moz Pro | | ambisuite0