Is there an efficient way to use Open Site Explorer to find unnatural or harmful links
-
We have a new client with 8 sites that we would like to 301 to a new site. However, before doing so we want to make sure that the backlinks are not unnatural or harmful in any way.
Using open site explorer (other than just looking at exact anchor text vs brand anchor text ratio) is there a way to determine low quality inbound sites linking in? or any type of links google will find manipulative?
-
I'm honestly not sure if there's a great way to use that process to drill back into the links to see which ones are low quality - it was intended more as a big picture look at your entire profile. We're actively working on more spam detection metrics, but it's a tricky business and we're really concerned about potentially giving people false alarms, especially with so many people hacking at their links.
I know some folks use OSE to export links and pull out specific bits of data, like very low PA pages, pages with exact-match anchor text on keyword-heavy phrases (non-brand), etc., but even then you've got to be a bit careful. A low PA page isn't necessarily "bad", just relatively weak, from a link perspective.
One spam marker we've found pretty relevant is sites with a disproportionately low MozTrust to their MozRank (or to their DA). Sites with high authority but low trust may have spammy link profiles in general. These are the kinds of factors that 3rd-party link evaluation tools look at. Some of them are a good starting point, but you still need to fact-check.
I'd definitely start with some kind of domain-based analysis. Your 40K links might be coming from 4K domains, or even 400. Getting a broad sense of linking-domain quality will be an easier starting point.
-
Bryan,
Dr. Pete did a post on this a while back and it might cut some time off the project for you. http://moz.com/blog/link-profiling-with-open-site-explorer.
-
Thanks Mark,
What if the site has 40,000 links?
How do sites like removeem do it? Just for the initial report?
Really hoping there is a way to do this without having to spend eternity manually looking : )
-
In my experience no.
You just have to take the time and go to each site and asses it for yourself. Its no fun but worth doing.
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
-
My Site Facing indexing issues
Hello, I am facing indexing issues on one of my which is about budget bushcraft knife , Four months have been passed I built my site and published almost 7 article so far. But i am worried no any single keyword ranked on google till yet as i checked through MOZ site explorer. Can anyone guide me what should I need to do now. Thanks
Link Explorer | | james112230 -
Why does OSE show different link equity for homepage with and without trailing slash?
Hi all, I am working with a developer who believes OSE (Open Site Explorer) is flawed. His reasoning is that OSE shows completely different link equity and domain authority for these two URLs [company name is purposely withheld]: http://www.mydomain.com/us/ and http://www.mydomain.com/us NOTE: http://www.mydomain.com/us has been properly 301-redirecting to http://www.mydomain.com/us/ for years. The developer's argument is that the URL that is being 301-redirected shouldn't have any link equity at all, therefore OSE is flawed. Here is the response I would like to give him. Please feel free to poke holes, provide feedback or flat out correct me if I am wrong: Dear inquisitive developer, Any URL that is being linked to by another site that has link equity will get link equity passed to it. This is true even if the URL is a page that doesn't exist. What it can't do (if it doesn't exist) is then pass that link equity on to another page. Moz's OSE is showing separate link equity for the two versions of this URL because other sites have linked to both versions. The fact that one 301-redirects to the other is good and ensures that link equity from one is passing to the preferred URL. The 301-redirect does not, however, remove link equity from the first URL, but rather passes the existing link equity from one to the other. Consequently, Moz's OSE is not flawed, but rather is displaying the link equity of one URL that is benefiting the other via a 301-redirect. Sincerely, Dana
Link Explorer | | danatanseo3 -
OSE Inbound Link Report Exports Returning Blank
We're trying to download a larger OSE report of inbound links and the report only has headers and no actual data. I'm logged in, so is there a bug here?
Link Explorer | | Highland0 -
Open Site Explorer and Expired Links?
Hi guys, I've been checking a few domains for SEO purposes and it appears that OSE is indexing a lot of links which no longer exist, this has been the case for over 6 months - does OSE cleanse expired links? As I'm sure they will be contributing to authority in the eyes of Moz?
Link Explorer | | lotterybase0 -
Is there some way to tell the Moz crawler not to crawl URL's with particular dynamic tags such as "?redirect-to:http//" ?
We are encountering an issue where the crawler is finding a ton of pages from our wordpress login url that has this dynamic tag in it to kinds of different blog entries. It's madness. I can't figure out what is causing these URLs to generate to be crawled in the first place! Does this sound familiar to anyone out there, any constructive suggestions? Robots text or maybe meta robots tags that would resolve this crawl issue?
Link Explorer | | RegistrarCorp0 -
Internal Equity Passing Links Showing 0
Hi There. I ran Open Site Explorer on a client's site and it's showing 0 for Internal Equity Passing Links and 0 Total Internal Links. Has anyone seen this before? If anyone knows what might be causing this I'd be very appreciative of the assistance. Thank you!
Link Explorer | | kwaterman0 -
Does Open Site Explorer recognise nofollow links?
In the backlink profile for my site on OSE, I'm seeing a lot of links that are paid advetorials and I know go through DoubleClick. I was informed that links going through Doubleclick automatically become NoFollow links. If the above is true, should I ignore these links? If they are NoFollow, they don't really contribute to my backlink profile? THANKS!
Link Explorer | | whis0
