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.
Would you disavow links that have a Moz Spam score of 5?
-
As the question suggests...
-
Spam score can be a useful adjunct when helping you decide which links to disavow, but you should never make a disavow decision based on spam score alone.
The disavow tool should be used by site owners who have a huge problem with unnatural links. If you know that this link is one that you yourself made for SEO purposes alone and that you have lots of links like this, then yes, you should probably disavow it.
But otherwise I wouldn't be too concerned.
-
No problem. I've expanded upon the original answer to clarify what the Spam Score references. This may be useful. (Read from UPDATE: down).
I hope that helps.
-
Thank you!
-
Nope. Moz suggest you don't get too excited about anything below an 8 and even then proceed with caution. Disavowing links is not usually something Google would expect you to need to get involved in, unless you are dealing with thousands of links.
"This [Disavow backlinks] is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."
From: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487
EGOL (who is wise in such matters) references this in a recent Q and A post and says he has never disavowed a single backlink, I've only ever done so once, in a panic and don't see myself doing so again. Much better to concentrate your efforts into countering the spammy links with great content.
UPDATE: Another thing to consider, if you click on Open Site Explorer > Spam Analysis - You'll see a number of these flags are issues you can fix without disavowing links. More often than not, you can fix a few of those. And remember, the Spam Score is not some hard and fast rule that Google follows; they are just a set of signals that Moz believe to have a correlation to Google penalties.
Here's the full list of Spam Flags from OSE > Spam Analysis:
Low MozTrust or MozRank Score
The site link profile is not trustworthy.✓
Large Site with Few Links
We found very few sites linking to this site, considering its size.✓
Site Link Diversity is Low
The diversity of link sources to this subdomain is low.✓
Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Subdomains
The ratio of followed to nofollowed subdomains linking to this subdomain is outside the normal range of others in our index.✓
Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Domains
The ratio of followed to nofollowed domains linking to this subdomain is outside the normal range of others in our index.✓
Small Proportion of Branded Links
Links to this subdomain have low amounts of branded anchor text.✓
Thin Content
A subset of pages within this subdomain have little content.✓
Site Mark-up is Abnormally Small
There's a high ratio of visible text compared to HTML, JavaScript, etc.✓
Large Number of External Links
A subset of pages within this subdomain has a large number of external links.✓
Low Number of Internal Links
Pages crawled on the subdomain have a small number of internal links.✓
Anchor Text Heavy Page
There's a high ratio of anchor text compared to content text.✓
External Links in Navigation
There's a large number of external links within sidebars and footers.✓
No Contact Info
None of the pages crawled contain an email address or links to a social profile.✓
Low Number of Pages Found
Crawl only gets a valid response to a small number of pages.✓
TLD Correlated with Spam Domains
This subdomain is on a top level domain (TLD) extension often found to be the source of spam links.✓
Domain Name Length
This domain name's character count is higher than average.✓
Domain Name Contains Numerals
Domain names including numbers are often found to be the source of spam links.Good luck.
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
-
Sitewide nav linking from subdomain to main domain
I'm working on a site that was heavily impacted by the September core update. You can see in the attached image the overall downturn in organic in 2019 with a larger hit in September bringing Google Organic traffic down around 50%. There are many concerning incoming links from 50-100 obviously spammy porn-related websites to just plain old unnatural links. There was no effort to purchase any links so it's unclear how these are created. There are also 1,000s of incoming external links (most without no-follow and similar/same anchor text) from yellowpages.com. I'm trying to get this fixed with them and have added it to the disavow in the meantime. I'm focusing on internal links as well with a more specific question: If I have a sitewide header on a blog located at blog.domain.com that has links to various sections on domain.com without no-follow tags, is this a possible source of the traffic drops and algorithm impact? The header with these links is on every page of the blog on the previously mentioned subdomain. **More generally, any advice as to how to turn this around? ** The website is in the travel vertical. 90BJKyc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShawnW0 -
Too many dofollow links = penalty?
Hi. I currently have 150 backlinks, 90% of them are dofollow, while only 10% are nofollow. I recently hit position #10 for my main keyword, but now it is dropped to #16 and a lot of related keywords are gone. So I have a few questions: 1. Was my website penalized for having an unnatural backlink profile (too many dofollow links), or maybe this drop in positions is just a temporary, natural thing? 2. Isn’t it too late for making the backlink profile look more natural by building more nofollow backlinks and making it 50%/50%? Thank you!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | NathalieBr0 -
What to do with internal spam url's google indexed?
I am in SEO for years but never met this problem. I have client who's web page was hacked and there was posted many, hundreds of links, These links has been indexed by google. Actually these links are not in comments but normal external urls's. See picture. What is the best way to remove them? use google disavow tool or just redirect them to some page? The web page is new, but ranks good on google and has domain authority 24. I think that these spam url's improved rankings too 🙂 What would be the best strategy to solve this. Thanks. k9Bviox
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndrisZigurs0 -
Spam sites with low spam score?
Hello! I have a fair few links on some of the old SEO 'Directory' sites. I've got rid of all the obviously spammy ones - however there are a few that remain which have very low spam scores, and decent page authority, yet they are clearly just SEO directories - I can't believe they service any other purpose. Should we now just be getting rid of all links like this, or is it worth keeping if the domain authority is decent and spam score low? Thanks Sam
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | wearehappymedia0 -
Advice needed! How to clear a website of a Wordpress Spam Link Injection Google penalty?
Hi Guys, I am currently working on website that has been penalised by Google for a spam link injection. The website was hacked and 17,000 hidden links were injected. All the links have been removed and the site has subsequently been redesigned and re-built. That was the easy part 🙂 The problems comes when I look on Webmaster. Google is showing 1000's of internal spam links to the homepage and other pages within the site. These pages do not actually exist as they were cleared along with all the other spam links. I do believe though this is causing problems with the websites rankings. Certain pages are not ranking on Google and the homepage keyword rankings are fluctuating massively. I have reviewed the website's external links and these are all fine. Does anyone have any experience of this and can provide any recommendations / advice for clearing the site from Google penalty? Thanks, Duncan
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CayenneRed890 -
How/Why do I have so many Spam backlinks?
I was looking in GWT yesterday and found we have several thousand "spam" backlinks...I am curious why this happens and how this happens? There are some links from websites/domains that are not mine that appear to be spam. However, we own a large group of domains and have noticed some of the links are coming from 2 of those sites/domains we own to my main site. The sites/domains are not active, we just own them. I am wondering how someone could access these domains that are not active and create spammy backlinks to my main website? (They created about 20,000 links). Thanks.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | carlystemmer0 -
Does anyone have any suggestions on removing spammy links?
I have some clients that recently got hit by "Penguin" they have several less than desireable backlinks that could be the issue? Does anyone have any suggestions on getting these removed? What are the odds that a webmaster on these spammy sites are going to remove them, and is it worth the time and effort?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | RonMedlin3 -
Partners and Customers logo listing and links
We have just created a program where we list the customers that use our software and a link to their websites on a new "Customers" page. We expect to have upwards of 100 logos with links back to their sites. I want to be sure this isn't bordering on gray or black hat link building. I think it is okay since they are actual users of our software. But there is still that slight doubt. Along these same lines, would you recommend adding a nofollow or noindex tag? Thanks for your help.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | PerriCline0