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.
Spam links and Domain Authority
-
I have a site that I know was Domain Authority 35 but now Domain Authority 25 after someone sent a load of spam links to it, how can this be correct and how can I change it?
Is it worth doing a disavow and will moz take that into account?
-
Hi there,
Sam from Moz's Help Team here - thanks so much for reaching out!
So, a couple of things - when you disavow a link through Google, it doesn't actually remove the link, Google just stops putting SEO weight into it. So our crawler will still find the link. Unfortunately there isn't a way in Link Explorer to "disavow" a link yet so we will still show it.
Disavowing a link doesn't take it away from our tools, so they will still appear as backlinks to your site. 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 with Google:).
I also want to note a couple of things about your DA drop in general - overall, seeing your DA drop is a fairly common problem and can be attributed to a few things:
1.Links we previously discovered are now marked as lost.
2. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more.
3. The links you've earned are from sites that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings.
4. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't).It's a bit difficult to isolate the exact cause of what happened without your own SEO consultant or developer being able to take a dive into this, but you can definitely read more specific information here if you'd like to understand more about the process:).
Something else to note is that on March 5th, we rolled out an entirely new DA calculation method, which affected the DA of many sites. You can read more about this update here https://moz.com/domain-authority-2.0.
Do let us know if we can help with anything else!
-
But does Moz take this into account and Google say here there is no need?
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/gary-illyes-google-penguin-negative-seo-disavows/296609/
-
Moz won't take it into account as, when you use the disavow tool, you send the file directly to Google, so Moz will have no visibility.
Your DA has no direct impact on your ranking, so if you've disavowed the links, I would simply make a note of it and carry on about your business.
In all fairness, Google is pretty good at ignoring that kind of thing now, so unless you've had a manual action (or it was very recent and you're anticipating one) it may not be worth the effort of creating and uploading a disavow file.
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
-
Ranking keyword and links
I have Created the website 3 months ago related to APk Games. And updating content daily and linking but the linked results in Moz are not showing Properly. my site have some ranking keywords on google at 1st but moz showing 0 ranking keywords. my question is how many time will take moz to show actual results. Thanks
Link Explorer | | khannnnnndnnnnnnnnnnss0 -
My backlinks are not indexing , Added in the link tracking list too
I have waited for three days to index my backlinks on moz but still they are not indexed in moz backlink index 😞 How to index backlinks in moz so that I can track all are ok ?
Link Explorer | | esdda81111 -
How to download full list of internal links properly with OSE?
Hi Moz Community, I am having issues getting a full list of my internal links when I go to the Open Site Explorer. When I export the internal links into excel, I am getting half of my URLs and 80% of what I am getting is absolutely crazy URLs that are super super old. Plus, these old URLs are not even showing in my campaign crawls. So the crawls themselves are different. Any help on this would be greatly appreciated, since I am trying to get a full picture on the internal link structure of my site. Thanks!
Link Explorer | | RyanRhodesGW0 -
What does "Number of Linking Root Domains" in Open Site Explorer actually mean?
I've read through the forum, but I'm confused as to what "Number of Linking Root Domains" means in the Linking Domains report. For example, if the root domain is Moz.com and the number is 135,000 does that mean there are 135,000 links from Moz pointing back to my site or does it mean there are 135,000 sites linking back to Moz? Any help is appreciated. Thank you!
Link Explorer | | karrabarron1 -
Crawling and Links - Showing Links
Hello I have a campaign in Moz that shows a new site as having no domain authority and no links. The site does have links to it, but they don't show up on OSE. Does Moz count links in the comments section of blogs (or is this counted as social, when the commenting system is one that requires facebook login?) I know blog comments are not great for SEO, I just use them when the post/link is 100% genuinely relevant. The site does have actual links on websites not just comment links, so it isn't showing any type of link. What is the best way to see the links the site has? Thanks!
Link Explorer | | wearehappymedia1 -
Do other sites linking to my page with a low domain authority affect my rankings?
Hello, my page authority 30, I see other page with an authority of 21 for example linking to us. Is this good or bad, does this affect our ranking? A lot of these don't have anchor text, I'm guessing we should reach out to these webmaster to include anchor text with the keywords we want to drive traffic to this page or make as descriptive as possible? Thanks! Laura
Link Explorer | | lauramrobinson320 -
A simple count (with list if possible) of the external and internal links on a website
Dear Moz Community, I am trying to find a way to easily analyse a website (http://uk.chm-cbd.net) to determine the number of internal and external hyperlinks throughout the (roughly) 490 webpages within the site. It would also be extremely helpful to have a list of all the links with their url. Does anyone know of a tool, methodology to do this? If it requires a lot of programming then that does not help me very much as I am not very computer literate!! So a software to download or an online service would be very helpful. Open Site Explorer seems to be limited, such that I would have to do an analysis on each page within the website. BUT, if anyone knows how I can do using OSE, then please tell me. Thanks in advance to anyone who may be able to help Hugh
Link Explorer | | HLConsulting0