A large number of high spam links are negatively affecting my DA, how do I remove them?

[beckygh]

I have identified a large number of very high spam score links to "free wallpaper" coming into my site.
I am running a wordpress blog and would like some advice on the best course of action. There are thousands of spam domains linking to various images on my site with the anchor text "get free high quality hd wallpaper"

The webmasters for these domains are not contactable so I am planning to submit a disavow file to google. I am aware these links have negatively affected my DA so would like to do more to remove them.

My questions are:

will deleting the images they link to help?
As this is on a wordpress site deleting the images will result in a soft 404, should I force a hard 404 to properly break the link?
Will this positively improve my DA?

[NickSamuel]

+1 for Serge's answer, their answer is textbook and really spot on! If you follow this advice it's impossible to go too far wrong

[sergeystefoglo]

Hi there,

In terms of your questions:

• Deleting images or pages spammy links point to won't help since the links will still point to your domain regardless of if the place they are pointing to results in a 200 status. Also, I wouldn't recommend deleting any images or pages if they are important to the site!
• If you did remove assets or pages, it would have no impact on your domain authority.

If I were in your shoes, I would disavow the extremely spammy links and then carry on with other projects (building the brand/audience). If you're still concerned with spammy links coming in, I'd recommend setting up a framework to update your disavow file every ~6 months or so. Google has gotten good about ignoring a lot of clearly spammy links, but I still like to disavow the really bad ones just in case.

Also, don't forget that domain authority is just a metric that tries to represent the overall strength of a domain based on links. Google doesn't actually use DA (although it's likely they use something similar) so I wouldn't stress too hard about increasing DA (although that might be the lever you need to pull).

In short, I would:

• Disavow the really bad links.
• Do that once every 6-12 months if you're concerned.
• Move forward with other forward-thinking tasks like building out content hubs, building the brand up, working on social presence, etc.

Hope that helps!