Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Would you consider these domains spammy or at risk for penguin penalty?
-
I'm doing a bit of competitor backlink auditing and am curious how you view these domains?
I also am doing this for others as a comparison and growing reference maybe of domains that they can crosscheck with their own backlink profile and make sure these aren't on there, in preparation for penguin algo release to core.
Either chime in with known domains to be spam, and I will create a live list based on answers here.
Domain Domain Rating
directoryworld.net 64
prlog.ru 60
torchbrowser.com 60
jzip.com 58
localbiznetwork.com 58
gimpsy.com 54
pageonepower.com 52
nashvillelife.com 49
2thetopdesign.com 49
seocounsel.com 48
healthywealthyaffiliate.com 48
hollinslegal.com 48On a working Disavow list either in root domain or extended url form
seocourt.com
wldirectory.com
onpaco.com
lostdirectory.com
ligginit.comligginit.com
alivedir.net
tiptopdirectory.com
onemilliondirectory.com
submittolinkdirectory.comI've read that sitewide footer links even from parent company sites will only count as one, regardless of how many links they have, I was wondering if that was true as well?
-
Matt Cutts on Sitewide Backlins That pretty much will tell you everything you want to know.
As far as the domains being spammy, really that's going to have to be a personal decision. Just because the word directory is in the name, it isn't a spam site. Just because there is a hyphen, doesn't make it spam. Google is progressively becoming more and more powerful, and more and more capable at telling what is real, and what isn't.
Visit those websites, do they look like spam to you? Do they look like a directory listing site do you? If you worked at google, and had to do a site audit, would you ding someone for linking those sites?
Really for all intensive purposes wikipedia was a directory, and then it started getting powerful, and gaining traction, and then it was being abused.
Anyway, I guess to answer your question, you will have to look at the websites to actually know the answer. Is the website functioning as merely a place to gather links? Then yes, it is probably spam.
EDIT: Also, at first I thought this was a competitor analysis, but considering that you are mentioning disavow, I will presume this is for you. The disavow tool is VERY powerful, and I would use it very sparingly. Do what you can to organically remove the links before disavowing them. Not only that but if you still have links from these sources, you are still getting some sort of juice, so build a bridge before burning a bridge. Replace those links with new ones, from legit sources. Write some press releases, post some solid social media, reach out to bloggers etc.
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
-
Exact Domain Match does it help or distract?
Does owning / buying an exact domain match help or not necessary? For example our main website ranks for nearly 14,800 Keywords but one KW we are trying to get in the top spot for we are currently at the bottom of page #1. We do see an exact domain match available so we purchased it but i don't know if it would actually help us or distract us. I was thinking we could create an article about the keyword on that exact domain then do some on page seo and back linking. But would that be more of a distraction VS. just focusing on getting more high quality back links to the main website we have ranked on Page 1 at the bottom? Any ideas or benefits to use an exact domain match to help boost also?
Link Building | | Cfarcher0 -
Spammy links redirecting to homepage of site -
Hey guys, I'm auditing a website at the moment and Moz is showing a few spammy links linking to it. The problem is these domains are all 301 redirecting to the domain I'm auditing. Let's say I'm auditing Site A. Site B is been flagged in Moz OSE with 12 spam flags. When I try to open Site B in a browser, it redirects back to Site A. What's the best thing to do, here? Disavowing domains redirecting to the site is surely a bad idea? Cheers.
Link Building | | BrianYork-AIM0 -
Backlinks from ads on parked domains? Is this possible?
Hello Moz Friends, So as I was researching some competitive backlinks and I noticed a lot of backlinks that a clients competitor has are on parked domains and they appear to be google ads from some point. You know the pages that this page no longer exists, or hey do you want to buy this domain? and it has like 6 google ads on it? Yep those pages. My clients industry is construction and their competitor has links from zombie websites, foreign, websites and more. But the links are no longer on the page. Like when it was crawled, their ad was showing. Does this make any sense and is it usually temporary? Thank you for your thoughts friends!
Link Building | | asbchris0 -
Spammy no follow backlinks - what should I do?
There is a individual/company that is creating lots of spam sites in my niche. It doesn't seem that they are trying to rank for any keywords, so I'm a little confused as to their purpose, but here's what they're doing. They scrape the top 10 Google results for each keyword and create a page - so if the niche is "widgets", they scrape the top 10 ranked sites for 'widgets', 'blue widgets', 'red widgets', and so on. A 'results' page is created for each keyword, which is linked from a home page. The results page always contains 10 websites - text is the site metadescription or similar. Each website gets a nofollow link back with the page title used as the anchor text. The host sites all have the keyword in the domain name - e.g www.widgetsxyz.com. The sites are thrown together but interestingly have a very crappy but individual logo (like 90's clipart). The host sites all have high DA/PA due to some very extensive link spam pointing to the sites, with very targeted keywords. There is seemingly no purpose to these sites that I can see - no other 'followed' links on the page or site. Whoever is doing this is churning out tens, if not hundreds of these sites. Any ideas what might be going on here, and whether I should be disavowing these sites (even though no follow). The fear is that they could switch the links to do follow, and get all the major players penalised in one fell swoop. ???
Link Building | | johnohara0 -
.Org domain authority
When it comes to .org domain authority is it more important to be getting the link from a .org regardless of DA, or does their domain authority still have a big impact here? Thanks!
Link Building | | TicketCity0 -
Does blocking domains help remove bad links?
I have affiliate websites that are harming for one of 2 reasons: 1. They are on adult websites (and I don't want to be in a bad neighborhood) or 2. They are using a Frameset (so their content appears identical to mine and I am getting "credit" for all their junk links) I cannot get these websites to remove our links so I have blocked their IPs on our production firewall. Is this an effective method or should I do something else with these links?
Link Building | | theLotter0 -
Frustrated with spammy backlinks from competitors
I've only been doing SEO for my company for the last month and I've made some headway but what is really frustrating me right now is a couple of competitors that have OBVIOUS spammy links ranking in the number 1,2,3 stops all over the board for the keywords i'm going for. One competitor in particular has anchor text links EVERYWHERE that make absolutely no sense...junk like... "I have never been more saddened by anything in my life than when my grandfather got cancer. I told my uncle he needed to buy some auto insurance. I really like pork." I mean, these links are the pages with the most page authority and page rank out of all of the ones they have...and I'd venture to say that almost all of their backlinks are like this...well, half of them are just random links with good anchor text on the sidebar of a bazillion spam websites (diapers, toys, fake blogs, etc.)...while i have about 3k links and most of my top competitors have about 5k links...these guys have over 33k. Worse yet, when I look at something like Alexa rank, they have pretty high overall traffic rank but it shows traffic rank in MX (mexico) instead of the US...these guys only sell in the US! I mean, they're black hat if I've ever seen such a thing and they rank superbly on all keywords. What can I do to compete with this junk?
Link Building | | jgower0 -
Can link juice be passed in an iframe from domain A to domain B
Need to give our web partners our booking form which must be loaded in an iframe calling back to our domain. Is it possible to pass any link juice from their domain loading our iframe back to us. Was thinking of a "Powered by" text link in the form footer, but I'm guessing the link needs to be outside the iframe. Would love to hear any thoughts or workarounds on this.
Link Building | | apolloseo1