Spam sites with low spam score?
-
Hello!
I have a fair few links on some of the old SEO 'Directory' sites. I've got rid of all the obviously spammy ones - however there are a few that remain which have very low spam scores, and decent page authority, yet they are clearly just SEO directories - I can't believe they service any other purpose.
Should we now just be getting rid of all links like this, or is it worth keeping if the domain authority is decent and spam score low?
Thanks
Sam
-
Cheers Peter. As usual with the dark arts of SEO, no one size fits all solution
That's helpful though - Thanks -
There isn't one-answer-fit-all solution.
You should watch that links and sites for sure. For now keep them as-is. There are many old, authoritative and trusted directories in web. Examples can be found easy - Yellow Pages, DMOZ, Yelp, etc. So you should watch not only your links but also whole directory for spammy submissions, anchor text modifications, new links, spammy changes, etc. This can be the moment when directory will be turned into toxic asset and links can become bad. You should also watch for unusual changes - example i know software directory with links for "insurance in NY". Because site change this owner and new one start selling links with anchor.
This is why i cannot give you advise based on your question. But you should see some statistical numbers (DA/PA/Spam/Alexa/TF/CF/Ahrefs/social shares). You also need to see few pages of site and then you can know is site good and bad.
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
-
Is new domian redirection to old domain make risk for my site ?
i have site with Da about 30 and i have many project on it if i register a domain for each project and after that redirect to my site is that bad for my site and my site seo ? for ex: my project is : mysite.com/helloword i register helloworld.com or domain like that helllo-world.com and redirctet to mysite.com/helloworld
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MidnightShop791 -
My site in 2 page
my site in 2 page how can i rank with this keywords in dubai legal translation in Dubai
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | saharali150 -
Will including a global-site link in all 100 local-sites footer be considered spammy?
If I am a car manufacturer brand site(global), and I request all my location-specific domains include a link to the global site in their footers, would this trigger a red flag for Google? There are roughly 100 location-specific sites, but I would like to come up with a long term solution, so this number could be larger in the future. Is it best practice to only follow the footer link on each location-specific site Homepage, and nofollow the rest of the footer links on each site? Is it best to only include one followed link to the manufacturer brand site (global) on each location-specific domain? Is it best to not put this global link in the footer, but rather towards the top of the page only on the homepage?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Jonathan.Smith0 -
Competitor outranking you with link spam. What would be your next steps?
FYI: I've already searched the forums for previous posts on this topic and although some are helpful, they don't tend to have many responses, so I'm posting this again in the hope of more interaction from the community 😉
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | adamlcasey
So can I please ask the community to tell me what course of action you would take, if this was happening to you? We have been ranking in position 1 for a major keyword in our space for the past 18 months. Today I logged into my Moz account and to keyword rankings to find that we have dropped to 2nd. So I placed the competitors website; who's now in 1st position, into OSE and looked under the "Just Discovered" tab. There are 258 newly discovered links, 95% of which use keywords in the anchor text!
So I reviewed the rankings for all of these other keywords being targeted and sure enough they are now dominating the top 1-3 spots for most of them. (some of which we are also attempting to rank for and have subsequently been pushed down the rankings) Their links are made up of: Forum and blog comments - always using anchor text in the links Article's posted on web 2.0 sites (Squidoo, Pen.io, Tumblr, etc) Profile page links Low quality Press Release sites Classified ad sites Bookmarking sites Article Marketing sites Our competitors sell safety solutions into the B2B market yet the topics of some of the sites where these links appear include: t-shirts sports news online marketing anti aging law christian guitars computers juke boxes Of the articles that I quickly scanned, it was clear they had been spun as they didn't read well/make sense in places. So my conclusion is that they have decided to work with a person (can't bring myself to call them an seo company) who have provided them with a typical automated link building campaign using out dated, poor seo practices that are now classified as link spam. No doubt distributed using an automated link publishing application loaded with the keyword rich anchor text links and published across any site that will take them. As far as I was aware, all of the types of links we're supposed to have be penalised by Google's Penguin & Panda updates and yet it seems they are working for them! So what steps would you take next?0 -
Site dropping in rank even through there are more backlinks being added
Hello, One of my client's sites is ranking lower than he should. This happened when we took off backlinks (20 little blogs, several site-wide paid links. It really dropped the site, but it had to be done. Since then we've increased his # of root domains by 10% through white hat link building in his non-competitive niche, and rankings are still poor. I know that's not much in the way of added backlink value, but we're working on it. My question is, how have the recent (and coming) updates possibly effected us. We want to take the remaining problem areas off right away, but another drop in traffic is not a good idea. Even though the blogs (see below) have no backlinks of themselves, they cause drops when taken off) He still has -20 little blog backlinks w/ a quarter of them being exact match anchor text.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW
-1 sitewide paid link - an image, exact match alt tag anchor text
-1 non-site-wide paid links that is an image near the footer, exact match alt tag anchor text.
-3 links on a domain, this one looks fairly editorial, but there are a bunch of paid links on that page. Changing to non-exact-match anchor text
-2 links on two domains that look completely editorial with no other paid links on that page. non-exact-match anchor text -70 backlinks total with about 1/3 being problematic. How does this site look in regards to updates and when to take links off without tanking our site even more? Thanks.0 -
Multiple Versions of Mobile Site
Hey Guys, We have recently finished the latest version of our mobile site which means currently we have 2 mobile sites. Depending on what device and Os will depend on which site you will be presented with.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | seekjobs
e.g.
iPhone 3 or 4 users on iOS4 will get version 1 of our mobile site
iPhone 5 users on iOS5 will get the new version (version 2) of our mobile site. Our old mobile site is currently indexed in Google and performing pretty well.
Since the launch of the second mobile site we have not see any major changes to our visibility in Google and so was curious My main concern here is duplicate content so I am curious can Google detect that we have 2 mobile site that we serve depending on device? And if Google can detect this, why has our sites not been penalized! Thanks, LW I know the first thing that comes to your mind is Duplicate content0 -
Website Vulnerability Leading to Doorway Page Spam. Need Help.
Keywords he is ranking for , houston dwi lawyer, houston dwi attorney and etc.. Client was acquired in June and since then we have done nothing but build high quality links to the website. None of our clients were dropped/dinged or impacted by the panda/penguin updates in 2012 or updates previously published via Google. Which proves we do quality SEO work. We went ahead and started duplicating links which worked for other legal clients and 5 months later this client is either dropping or staying in local maps results and we are performing very badly in organic results. Some more history..... When he first engaged our company we switched his website from a CMS called plone to word press. During our move I ran some searches to figure out which pages we needed to 301 and we came across many profile pages or member pages created on the clients CMS (PLONE). These pages were very spammy and linked to other plone sites using car model,make,year type keywords (ex:jeep cherokee dealerships). I went through these sites to see if they were linking back and could not find any back links to my clients website. Obviously nobody authorized these pages, they all looked very hackish and it seemed as though there was a vulnerability on his plone CMS installation which nobody caught. Fast forward 5 months and the newest OSE update is showing me a good 50+ back links with unrelated anchor text back links. These anchor text links are the same color as the background and can only be found if you hover your mouse over certain areas of the site. All of these sites are built on Plone and allot of them are linked to other businesses or community websites. These websites obviously have no clue they have been hacked or are being used for black hat purposes. There are dozens of unrelated anchor text links being used on external websites which are pointing back to our clients website. Examples: <a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">autex Isuzu, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">Toyota service department ratings, </a><a class="clickable title link-pivot" style="color: #5e5e5e; font-family: Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; line-height: normal;" title="See top linking pages that use this anchor text">die cast BMW and etc..</a> Obviously the first step is to use the disavow link tool, which will be completed this week. The second step is to take some feedback from the SEO community. It seems like these pages are automatically created using some type of bot. It will be very tedious if we have to continually remove these links. I hope there is a way to notify Google that these websites are all plone and have a vulnerability, which black hats are using to harm the innocent... If i cannot get Google to handle this, then the only other option is to start fresh with a new domain name. What would you do in this situation. Your help is greatly appreciated. Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | waqid0 -
Spammy Links, SERPs, and Low Competition Keywords
While I've seen a lot of news about Google cleaning up content farms, link farms, and similar spam, I've also seen some companies start ranking very well for niche terms using these same practices. Question: Does Google completely discount links from content farms and similar sites or simply give them low value? Observation: I've seen a company start ranking well (top 3) for several terms when they used be on page 2. When I looked at their links, they are from article farms, directories, do-follow blogs and similar low-vale sources. Relative to others, they have about 10x the volume of links with the precise anchor text they are targeting. I wonder in absence of other information that these spammy links still count for something. Given the low competition for the term, this is enough to boost their rank. Just thoughts some thoughts as we are working on long-tail strategies for some key terms.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jeff-rackaid.com0