Which trumps: spam ranking or domain authority?

[SOLVISTA]

I am trying to manage my backlinks by removing ones with high spam links, but I am having trouble drawling the line between helpful/harmful links.  One link, for instance, has a span ranking of 7 indicating a 30% chance of penalization from Google crawlers.  This same link, however, also boasts a domain authority of 67 which indicates it is also potentially helpful to my own Google crawler success. My question is, which of these scores (spam rank and domain authority) trumps the other?  Should I try to get the site owner to remove it?  Am I even thinking about this issue correctly?  If so, how would you suggest I draw the line in the future?

Ben

[SOLVISTA]

Great, I'll use that as a rule of thumb in the future.  I think Moz should maybe emphasize this point as a way to think about backlink manangement.  Thanks!

[jameskais]

Ben - this all depends on your industry and the blogs/news sources in the industry. For example if all of your other backlinks have a DA of 80+ a 67 will be at the lower end of the spectrum. You'll always want to target backlinks with a higher DA than your own.

By doing so you'll see link authority being passed along to you.

It is a bit hard to answer and there is not hard rules in place for something like this, as each case is unique and there may be value in lower authority growing sites.

[SOLVISTA]

• James,

  My next question, then, would be: how should I approach this predicament in the future?  Is there a threshold for DA/PA at which I disregard the potential helpfulness of the link and only worry about the spam score?  Would you still say it was a helpful link if the DA was 50 instead of 67? How about a DA of 40?  Perhaps my question becomes unanswerable as it becomes more philosophical and subjective?

  -Ben

[jameskais]

Hey There Ben! In this case you'll always want to refer to what has more impact - the spam flags indicate a 30% likelihood that this is spam which is still leaving 70% that this is not spam, combine that with the DA/PA and this is still looking like a good link! You may want to monitor it over time during the next few indexes as good links can turn bad!