A large number of high spam links are negatively affecting my DA, how do I remove them?
-
I have identified a large number of very high spam score links to "free wallpaper" coming into my site.
I am running a wordpress blog and would like some advice on the best course of action. There are thousands of spam domains linking to various images on my site with the anchor text "get free high quality hd wallpaper"The webmasters for these domains are not contactable so I am planning to submit a disavow file to google. I am aware these links have negatively affected my DA so would like to do more to remove them.
My questions are:
will deleting the images they link to help?
As this is on a wordpress site deleting the images will result in a soft 404, should I force a hard 404 to properly break the link?
Will this positively improve my DA? -
+1 for Serge's answer, their answer is textbook and really spot on! If you follow this advice it's impossible to go too far wrong
-
Hi there,
In terms of your questions:
- Deleting images or pages spammy links point to won't help since the links will still point to your domain regardless of if the place they are pointing to results in a 200 status. Also, I wouldn't recommend deleting any images or pages if they are important to the site!
- If you did remove assets or pages, it would have no impact on your domain authority.
If I were in your shoes, I would disavow the extremely spammy links and then carry on with other projects (building the brand/audience). If you're still concerned with spammy links coming in, I'd recommend setting up a framework to update your disavow file every ~6 months or so. Google has gotten good about ignoring a lot of clearly spammy links, but I still like to disavow the really bad ones just in case.
Also, don't forget that domain authority is just a metric that tries to represent the overall strength of a domain based on links. Google doesn't actually use DA (although it's likely they use something similar) so I wouldn't stress too hard about increasing DA (although that might be the lever you need to pull).
In short, I would:
- Disavow the really bad links.
- Do that once every 6-12 months if you're concerned.
- Move forward with other forward-thinking tasks like building out content hubs, building the brand up, working on social presence, etc.
Hope that 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
-
Internal Links
In OSE, it is reporting that i don't have any internal links to my homepage. In the header on every page is my logo in the top left hand corner which links back to my homepage. Shouldn't this mean then that every page should link to the home page? Similarly, internal pages which link from my main nav aren't showing up as having any internal links in OSE. Any ideas?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Too many links? Do links to named anchors count (ie page#nameanchor)?
Hi, I have an internal search results page that contains approx 200 links in total. This links to approx 50 pages. Each result listing contains a link to the page in the format /page.html and also has 3 more links (for each listing) to named anchors within the page. eg /page.html#section1, /page.html#section2, /page.html#section3 etc. Should i remove the named anchors to keep my links per page under the Seomoz suggested max of 100? Will it impact crawl-ability or link juice being passed? Thanks in advance for your response.
Technical SEO | | blackrails0 -
Cross links between sites
hi, We have several ecommerce sites and we cross linked 3 of them by mistake. We realize that the sites were linked through WMT, We have shut down 2 of the sites about 2 months ago, but WMT still shows the links coming from those 2 sites. how do we make sure that google will see the sites are shut down. Is there a better of way resolving this issue. We are no longer using those sites, so do not need them to be active. whats the best solution to show google that the links are no longer there. Crawler shows that it was able to crawl the site 45 days after it is shut down. thanks nick
Technical SEO | | orion680 -
How many links can i do in a day
Hi, I built a niche site yesterday, the domain was 1 week old. What is the safest way to do link building? I.e How many links should i do in order to be in safe? So far, i've concentrated on building my social profile. Like getting as many retweets as possible. Slowly getting facebook likes and added few youtube videos with my link in it. Now i am on to link building. I will only do legit link building methods. Currently i am gonna get 2 press releases. But can you tell me no. of links i must get in a day. PS: The keyword i am competing is highly competitive.
Technical SEO | | Vegit0 -
Pinterist links no follow or followed?
in OSE it says we are getting lots of good links from pages like this on pinterest; pinterest.com/cbn456/inspiration-at-home However if you look at the code it says nofollow. Am I missing something or is OSE just missing it?
Technical SEO | | iAnalyst.com0 -
Too many on page links
Hi All, As we all know, having to much links on a page is an obstacle for search engine crawlers in terms of the crawl allowance. My category pages are labeled as pages with to many "one page" links by the SEOmoz crawler. This probably comes from the fact that each product on the category page has multiple links (on the image and model number). Now my question is, would it help to setup a text-link with a clickable area as big as the product area? This means every product gets just one link. Would this help get the crawlers deeper in these pages and distribute the link-juice better? Or is Google smart enough already to figure out that two links to the same product page shouldn't be counted as two? Thanks for your replies guys. Rich
Technical SEO | | Horlogeboetiek0 -
Can I reduce link count by no following links?
Hi, A large number of my pages contain over 100 links. This is due to a large drop down navigation which is on every page. To reduce my link count could I just no follow these navigation links or would I have to remove the navigation completely?
Technical SEO | | moesian0 -
How do I know which page a link is from
I've got an interesting situation. I hope you can help. I have a list of links but I'm not sure which pages of my site they are from. How do I know which page a specific link is from? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | VinceWicks0