Will Removing or Disavowing Toxic Links Improve MOZ Domain Authority?
-
The vast majority of the 140 domains that link to our website are very low quality directories or and other toxic links. Only about 20-30 domains are not toxic (according to Link Research Tools confirmed by out manual inspection of these links).
Would removing some of these links improve of MOZ Domain Rank? What if we cannot remove them, can NOZ detect a disavow file?
In general would improving the ratio between good quality and poor quality links improve domain authority?
Thanks,
Alan -
Hi Lauren:
Do on page factors influence Domain Authority as much as building back links? This is a really key question!
I need to decide whether to invest resources in building back links or improving on site SEO. How about internal links? How much do they contribute to domain authority? At the moment my site lacks internal links, would adding them in a relevant manner improve domain authority?
While I greatly appreciate your last response it is somewhat ambiguous.
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi Again Lauren:
According to Rand Fishkin's post:
https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how-to-interpret-apply-understand-these-ml-based-scoresDomain Authority is predominantly determined by backlinks from other websites rather than on site SEO factors (content quality, internal linking). This contradicts your response somewhat which make things really confusing. Now I don't know whether to allocate resources towards building backlinks from other domains or whether to work on improving internal links and contents.
If you could please clear this up it would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
Alan
-
Hi Lauren:
Thanks for your response. I was under the impression that domain authority was solely determined by external backlinks. So, are you saying that domain authority can be increased by improving the internal linking structure between pages and improving the quality of pages?
Our site has many, many "orphan" pages. From what you are saying, improving the internal linking structure would improve our Domain Authority, is that correct?
Also MOZ shows certain title tags, URLs and descriptions as too long, some are duplicate and some missing. Would correcting these help improve domain authority?
Is it safe to say that improved Domain Authority would increase the likely hood of improved ranking?
Thanks,
Alan -
It's worth considering whether you should disavow links if you haven't seen a manual penalty.
We generally only recommend disavowing links in the following situations:- For sites that have made links for SEO purposes on a large scale
- For sites that previously had a manual action for unnatural links
- For sites under obvious negative SEO attacks
If you see some weird links you probably do not need to be disavowing links.
When Google takes action either manually or algorithmically against a site for unnatural linking, it's because the site has been actively trying to manipulate Google rankings on a large scale. If you made a couple of directory links in the past, it's currently unlikely you'll get a penalty.Disavowing a link doesn't take it away so they will still appear as backlinks to your site within the Moz tools. The fact that Google disregards them in relation to your site does not take them off the sites they are on, so best practice is to approach the webmaster first and request the link be removed. If you get no response then disavow.
We always recommend manual investigation of a site to ensure it is a link that is causing harm to your site. When a link is disavowed it can be very difficult to regain that link equity.
To understand how to improve DA (Domain Authority) it can help to get some insight into how we gather our data, which I'll include below. Sorry in advance for the long message!
To calculate DA, we index the web by following links using a crawler. Our crawler is built on a machine-learning based model that is optimized to select pages like those that appear in our collection of Google SERPs. We feed the machine learning model with features of the URL like the backlink counts for the URL and the PLD (pay-level domains), features about the URL like its length and how many subdirectories it has, and features on the quality of the domains linking to the URL and PLD. So, it's not based on any one particular metric, but we're training the crawler to start with high-value links.
In terms of improving your Domain Authority, with the information above in mind, it's best to look at both you on-page SEO to make sure you've covered the basics.
Then you also want to look at your off-site SEO and building more links more links to your site.
There are lots of different areas of Link Building to explore, from patching up broken links, improving your internal link profile, and good ol' fashioned content creation.
Here is a great video by our founder Rand which goes over some easy link building tactics to get you started.You can read more about disavowing links this here: https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin
Sorry for the long response, I hope this helps!
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
-
Unsolved Why is my website Backlinks Lower on Moz than on SEMRush?
Hi, I'm new to Moz and I am trying to find out why my website Birmingham Roofers has 7 backlinks on Moz it has 21 on SEMRush. However, I read somewhere online in one of your blog post that it crawls in real time.
Moz Bar | | ajegunle1 -
Current Title is short but Moz show error that Title is Too Long
Hello, The current title of an article is of 30 characters. But in Moz it say "Title Element Too Long". The URL of the article is long. Please let me know why Moz is showing it as "Title Element Too Long"
Moz Bar | | ProcessSEO0 -
Why does the moz crawl test lists page twice?
Hi, I'm running into an issue where some crawlers list my pages twice, once with a trailing slash, once without. I first saw it on a few pages with screaming frog, then saw it happen on all my pages with the moz crawler. The site is www.kidsandart.org and its on Squarespace. I grepped the sitemap.xml I submitted to google webmaster and got 167 distinct pages, all of them without a trailing slash. Any insights on why this is happening, and how to regard moz crawler results would be appreciated. thanks Tom
Moz Bar | | tpushpathadam0 -
Domain.com isn't recognized by on-page-grader, but domain.com/index.php is
I am running a website through On-page-grader, as www.domain.com and scores an "F" for a specific keyword. When it's ran as www.domain.com/index.php, it scores an "A" for that same keyword and has everything checked other than "keyword in the domain name". There are no other files such as index.htm, or index.html that would interfere and can't figure out why this page is not being recognized. I checked, the robots and .htaccess file, but do not see anything that would hinder. Could this be a server issue?
Moz Bar | | werkbot0 -
Moz Crawl Test Tool - SEO Web Crawler showing up with no details
So basically I have ran the Moz Crawl Test tool twice for this url "bubblingwithenergy.info" and both times the report has listed 1 URL when there is obviously a lot more if you check the site. My question is, why is the Moz Crawl only reporting 1 URL when there are heaps? Is there a possibility it is being blocked and if so what would be blocking it? This website is using a CMS called Infusion and it is based off CMSMS (CMS Made Simple). Any answers would be greatly appreciated. Cheers
Moz Bar | | KBB_Digital0 -
Why does the Moz Tool Bar show code as HTML text for my site?
When I run my site in the Moz Tool bar, all of the page elements are read correctly except for HTML text. Sample page: http://www.lifeionizers.com/blog/alkaline-water/electrolyzed-reduced-water Instead of the text on that page, the tool shows Javascript code: /* With a very high character count for text (14,247).
Moz Bar | | karasd0 -
Will the videos for the 2013 Moz Con be available for purchase in a bundle like they were in 2012? If so when? Thanks!
Will the videos for the 2013 Moz Con be available for purchase in a bundle like they were in 2012? If so when and how much? I would like to purchase. Thanks!
Moz Bar | | larahill0 -
Have any insight into why our Moz Rank dropped?
I'm working on a site with a very low domain authority to start and in viewing our historical MozRank comparison to competitors I see that we had a MozRank between 2 and 3 two months ago, but now have a MozRank of 0. What could have triggered this dropoff? It's clear we need to boost domain authority, but we have never had any so we're no worse in that department now than we were two months ago. Any insight here would be useful. Thanks! W2A1u2D.png
Moz Bar | | bshanahan0