Disavow wn.com?

[gbkevin]

I am cleaning up some spammy backlinks for a client and will be submitting a disavow at Google.

This particular company website has 2,000+ backlinks from the domain wn.com which appears to be "World News". If you go to it, it appears to be nothing more than scraped content from other sites.

Here is a recent example, where my client is linked to (I don't even see the backlink on the page, but it is in the source code!):
http://article.wn.com/view/2013/11/22/Hungarian_Woman_Sentenced_to_One_Year_in_Prison_for_Her_Role/#/related_news

But when I look at Moz metrics, WN.com has a domain authority of 90! So I don't want to disavow something that could POTENTIALLY be helping us.

The client's website gets zero traffic from wn.com and I've never seen my client linked to in anything worthwhile... it kinda looks spammy to me.

If you were me, after looking at WN.com and taking everything into account... would you disavow it?

This client really needs to create a healthier backlink profile.

Thanks!

[Dr-Pete]

Good point by Kevin, too, that it does depend on the rest of your link profile and how solid it is. If you have thousands of linking root domains, just one domain isn't going to make or break you. Your overall profile is the key.

[Dr-Pete]

First, to Kevin's question, a high DA doesn't mean a site isn't spammy. It means the site has a lot of seemingly high-authority links (or just a large link profile from generally large sites, or a healthy mix). Some of the modelling controls for quality, but not necessarily spam factor - which is something we're actively working on.

I suspect the "articles." sub-domain carries less authority than the overall root domain, but it's tough to say. With so many links, you're probably getting some credit from the root domain.

Unfortunately, the weight of any one link or even 2,000 links from one domain is almost impossible to measure. So, it comes down to a risk/reward scenario. Are you just proactively cleaning things up, or are you fighting a serious fire, like an outright penalty that's killing traffic? If you're being proactive, I'd probably leave this alone, especially if you have solicited these links, paid for them, etc. If you're fighting a serious penalty, then you need to risk cutting deep, especially if you're doing a Penguin recovery.

[Treefrog_SEO]

I'm interested in this as well. I'm pretty new to this, but here are my comments/questions.

• Does a high DA from Moz automatically mean that the site is not perceived as spammy by Google's index? I'm not sure about this. I've seen some pretty spammy looking directories pull up a high Domain Authority in the MozBar, but this could be because of the site's size, number of outbound links, and other metrics.

• Have you determined whether there is any way to have the links removed by contacting the directory? From what I can see, Google recommends that we exhaust all possibilities for link removal before using the disavow tool, although in my experience it's not easy to contact anyone who "controls" these spammy directories.

• Do you have a stockpile of legitimate, authoritative links from reputable domains built up to offset the link removal? This should hopefully soften the blow if in fact you end up suffering any ranking penalty from having the link disavowed.

• Would it make sense to concentrate on building other reputable links before calling attention to links that are potentially spammy? Is it rocking the boat by disavowing a link to what seems like an authoritative site (at least as far as Moz is concerned) before having a solid foundation of reputable links? If that is the case, I'd focus my attention the other way: build the foundation first, then weed out the suspect links. But that's my opinion, I may be wrong. Very interested to see what other community members have to say about this!

[CommT]

I've found WN before and thought it looked quite good due to the domain authority. However, like you say, it's just a scraper.