Spammy inbound links: Don't Fix It If It's Not Broken?

[jcorbo]

Hi Moz community,

Our website is nearing the end of a big redesign to be mobile-responsive. We decided to delay any major changes to text content so that if we do suffer a rankings drop upon launch, we'll have some ability to isolate the cause.

In the meantime I'm analyzing our current SEO strengths and weaknesses. There is a huge discrepancy between our rankings and our inbound link profile. Specifically, we do great on most of our targeted keywords and in fact had a decent surge in recent months. But Link Profiler turned up hundreds of pages of inbound links from spammy domains, many of which don't even display a webpage when I click there. (shown in uploaded image)

"Don't fix it if it's not broken" is conflicting with my natural repulsion to these sorts of referrals. Assuming we don't suffer a rankings drop from the redesign, how much of a priority should this be? There are too many and most are too spammy to contact the webmasters, so we'll need to do it through a Disavow. I couldn't even open the one at the top of the list because our business web proxy identified it as adult content.

It seems like a common conception is that if Google hasn't penalized us for it yet, they will eventually. Are we talking about the algorithm just stumbling upon these links and hurting us or would this be something we would find in Manual Actions? (or both?)

How long after the launch should we wait before attacking these bad links? Is there a certain spam score that you'd say is a threshold for "Yes, definitely get rid of it"? And when we do, should we Disavow domains one domain at a time to monitor any potential drops or all at once? (this seems kind of obvious but if the spam score and domain authority alone is enough of a signal that it won't hurt us, we'd rather get it done asap)

How important is this compared to creating fresh new content on all the product pages? Each one will have new images as well as product reviews, but the product descriptions will be the same ones we've had up for years.  I have new content written but it's delayed pending any fallout from the redesign.

Thanks for any help with this!

d1SB2JP.jpg

[BlueprintMarketing]

Can share your domain?

[jcorbo]

Thanks, I think I started checking that out but will go back and complete it.

We haven't built any PBNs but we do have an affiliate marketing program through Commission Junction and have found poor quality links as a result of that in the past so there's a likely culprit for some. We also have a direct competitor in the same state who knows digital marketing well, so it's possible they've tried to sabotage our link profile a bit.

[BlueprintMarketing]

I will expand on this but don’t do a disavow (unless google told you to disavow  or  you made them using a PBN) it’s not going to help you ask them to remove the bad links google is most likely ignoring.

I will explain more in 4-6 hours.

search moz for the most recent WBF ab this  Cyrus does an awesome job of explaining why.

hope this helps,

Tom