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.
Removing poor domain authority backlinks worth it?
-
Hey Moz,
I am working with a client on more advanced SEO tactics. This client has a reputable domain authority of 67 and 50,000+ backlinks.
We're wanting to continue SEO efforts and stay on top of any bad backlinks that may arise.
Would it be worth asking websites (below 20 domain authority) to remove our links? Then, use the disavow tool if they do not respond.
Is this a common SEO practice for continued advanced efforts? Also, what would your domain authority benchmark be? I used 20 just as an example.
Thanks so much for your help.
Cole
-
Awesome responses guys. Anyone else have any other insight?
-
I updated my response while you were writing yours.
I don't doubt your insight. But The Googles doesn't sleep.
When you're doing a local campaign, with strictly above the board links, you should move as fast as possible.
-
That would be bad.
You should follow the rough 10-80-10 rule, whether you are building 10 links or 10,000 links. And you should always do it slowly.
I agree there are no specific percentages. You have to look at the big picture over a long period of time.
-
Let's say someone reads this and decides to get their first 10% in the crappy category. That would not be good for them. Further, there aren't any specific percentages that I'm aware of.
Yes, The Googles does have to pick the best of the worst. I'm not in doubt of that.
Yes, sometimes you inherit a mess but it seems to work. Manual reviews happen.
-
Big picture: What a good "problem" to have!
Without taking a close look at your specific URL...
...my first instinct is that the answer to your question is almost certainly a giant...
**No.
DO THE HARD THING: NOTHING!!!!** There is a real danger of overthinking this stuff and neglecting the fundamentals.
I faced the same issue with a DA72 site for a leading SME In his field who had 450,000+ backlinks....some from major media outlets and universities, but most from "nobodies" in the field. This is good!
What you want in a classic Inverted U-shaped curve in terms of DA.
-
10 % crappy links
-
80 % middling links
-
10% super high quality links
You mess with this at your peril!!!! Beware. "Bad" links are not necessarily bad in the grand scheme of universe. Every credible and authoritative site should have some. They are part of a natural link profile.
Getting rid of the <20 DA authority links could hurt...badly.
Focusing excessively on tweaking or sculpting the middling 80% of your links is probably a mistake. You could shoot yourself in the foot.
Less is more.
It might be better to just keep doing what you're doing.
This is hard...and requires great discipline!
-
-
Happy to be contrary. Another good thing about Link Detox is that the service has been trained - mostly for the good - by users manually reviewing the quality of their links. If easylinkseodirectory4u.com has been flagged enough, it's more likely to get caught by the machine.
Once you have uploaded your list and reviewed the links, you will get a pretty accurate risk rating. It scales from shades of low to high. I don't think Link Detox has ever given me a false Toxic rating on individual links either.
I'm not a client scalper, so if you would like to PM the domain name, I can take a look.
-
Excellent, quality response. Thanks so much.
I would love to hear from any disavow experts, maybe even costs of them (of course, I don't want to break any Moz rules that may be applicable).
Cole
-
Setting a DA cut-off from the outset is a bit too arbitrary. What if it's a link from a site with low DA and a low PA now, but later the site becomes the next New York Times? You don't want to disavow the next New York Times, but that's what an arbitrary number would have you do.
Further, DA and PA can be gamed to a certain extent. I'm sure Rap Genius has a pretty solid DA, but they were penalized all the same. So it would appear that using DA as a cut-off would be less than ideal.
There's no real easy way to do a disavow. You have to think about characteristics, context and intent. If you have links that pass juice, but were obviously paid - that may be a candidate. If there's a vast preponderance of links from seemingly low quality directories with exact match anchor text - those would be candidates for closer scrutiny as well. Dead giveaways are usually 'sponsored' links that pass juice.
Low quality directories usually let everyone in. You will know them by their viagra and casino anchor text. They're usually a pretty safe disavow candidate.
Does the site have a lot of links from spam blog comments from sites that are obviously unrelated? Has there been some guest blogging on free for all blogs? Those links would require some review as well.
Definitely prioritize your exact match anchor text links for review.
I would suggest you start with gathering link data from numerous sources:
- Google Webmaster Tools
- Bing Webmaster Tools
- Ahrefs
- Majestic SEO
- Etc.
Then filter the duplicates via spreadsheet voodoo. After that, drop it into a service like Link Detox. But be careful, it still throws false positives and false negatives. So again, there's no real way of getting out of a manual review. But Link Detox will speed up the process.
Are there plenty of disavow services out there? Sure, but I've never used them. I'm far too paranoid. A disavow is a delicate and lengthy process.
Are there some great disavow pros/individuals out there? Definitely. I would be far more likely to trust them. In fact, a couple will likely chime in here. Though they may be a little bit outside the budget. I don't know.
One final, important, point: A disavow is not a panacea. They take as long as they take. Though it is good that you appear to be proactive. You never know when the next Penguin filter will land. The site may be right with The Googles now, but it might not be later.
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 domain authority lost if you create a 301 redirect but mark it as noindex, nofollow?
Hi everyone, Our company sells products in various divisions. While we've been selling Product A and Product B under our original brand, we've recently created a new division with a new domain to focus on a Product B. The new domain has virtually no domain authority (3) while the original domain has some (37). We want customers to arrive on the new domain when they search for key search terms related to Product B instead of the pages that previously existed on our main website. If we create 301 redirects for the pages and content on the main site and add noindex, nofollow tags, will we lose the domain authority that we have from our original domain because the pages now have the noindex, nofollow tags? I read a few blog posts from Moz that said there isn't any domain authority lost with 301 redirects but I'm not sure if that is true if the pages are noindex, nonofollow. Do you follow? 🙂 Apologies for the lengthy post. Love this community and the great Moz team. Thanks, Joe
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jgoehring-troy0 -
Multiple Landing Pages and Backlinks
I have a client that does website contract work for about 50 governmental county websites. The client has the ability to add a link back in the footer of each of these websites. I am wanting my client to get backlink juice for a different key phrase from each of the 50 agencies (basically just my keyphrase with the different county name in it). I also want a different landing page to rank for each term. The 50 different landing pages would be a bit like location pages for local search. Each one targets a different county. However, I do not have a lot of unique content for each page. Basically each page would follow the same format (but reference a different county name, and 10 different links from each county website). Is this a good SEO back link strategy? Do I need more unique content for each landing page in order to prevent duplicate content flags?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shauna70840 -
Removing index.php
I have question for the community and whether or not this is a good or bad idea. I currently have a Joomla site that displays www.domain.com/index.php in all the URLs with the exception of the home page. I have read that it's better to not have index.php showing in the URL at all. Does it really matter if I have index.php in my URL? I've read that it is a bad practice. I am thinking about installing the sh404SEF component on my site and removing the index.php. However, I rank pretty high for the keywords I want in Google, Bing and Yahoo. All of the URLs that show up in the searches have index.php as part of the URL. Has anyone ever used sh404SEF to remove the index.php and how did you overcome not loosing your search engine links? I don't want an existing search showing www.domain.com/index.php/sales and it not linking to the correct page which would now be www.domain.com/sales. I guess I could insert the proper redirects in the htaccess file. But I was hoping to avoid having every page of my site in the htaccess file for redirecting. Any help or advice appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MedGroupMedia0 -
Community inside the domain or in a separate domain
Hi there, I work for an ecommerce company as an online marketing consultant. They make kitchenware, microware and so on. The are reviewing their overall strategy and as such they want to build up a community. Ideally, they would want to have the community in a separate domain. This domain wouldn't have the logo of the brand. This community wouldn't promote the brand itself. The brand would post content occassionally and link the store domain. The reasoning of this approach is to not interfere in the way of the community users and also the fact that the branded traffic acquired doesn't end up buying at the store I like this approach but I am concerned because the brand is not that big to have two domains separated and lose all the authority associated with one strong domain. I would definitely have everything under the same domain, store and community, otherwise we would have to acquire traffic for two domains. 1. What do you think of both scenarios, one domain versus two? Which one is better? 2. Do you know any examples of ecommerce companies with successful communities within the store domain? Thanks and regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | footd0 -
NEw domain extensions, are they worth it seo wise?
Hello I am curious if all of these new extensions for domains are worth it? So say you are a home builder and you bought homebuilder.construction - where as construction is a new extension, does this help seo? Or is it all just a big sales gimmick? Thank you for your thoughts
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Berner1 -
Is it safe to 301 redirect old domain to new domain after a manual unnatural links penalty?
I have recently taken on a client that has been manually penalised for spammy link building by two previous SEOs. Having just read this excellent discussion, http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience I am weighing up the odds of whether it's better to cut losses and recommend moving domains. I had thought under these circumstances it was important not to 301 the old domain to the new domain but the author (Lewis Sellers) comments on 3/4/13 that he is aware of forwards having been implemented without transferring the penalty to the new domain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience#jtc216689 Is it safe to 301? What's the latest thinking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ewan.Kennedy0 -
Hosting images on multiple domains
I'm taking the following from http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html "Splitting components allows you to maximize parallel downloads. Make sure you're using not more than 2-4 domains because of the DNS lookup penalty. For example, you can host your HTML and dynamic content on www.example.org and split static components between static1.example.org and static2.example.org" What I want to do is load page images (it's an eCommerce site) from multiple sub domains to reduce load times. I'm assuming that this is perfectly OK to do - I cannot think of any reason that this wouldn't be a good tactic to go with. Does anyone know of (or can think of) a reason why taking this approach could be in any way detrimental. Cheers mozzers.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eventurerob0 -
Are URL shorteners building domain authority everytime someone uses a link from their service?
My understanding of domain authority is that the more links pointing to any page / resource on a domain, the greater the overall domain authority (and weight passed from outbound links on the domain) is. Because URL shorteners create links on their own domain that redirect to an off-domain page but link "to" an on-domain URL, are they gaining domain authority each time someone publishes a shortened link from their service? Or does Google penalize these sites specifically, or links that redirect in general? Or am I missing something else?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jay.Neely0