Hi Liana,

As far as spammy links, Google has done well detecting whether or not they are intentional, aka black hat. If they aren't, Google does not penalize you for these links, so it's best to leave them.

As far as a strategy for generating links to your website, you should always focus on high quality over quantity. High quality links give you exponentially more return than high quantity of bad links.

I recommend this article Google wrote for us to understand when and how to disavow links.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

In short, rarely do you ever need to disavow links, even if they have a high spam score. You are only hurt when they sense you are gaming the system and in the case that they detect or suspect unethical backlinking, you will be penalized with a "manual action". You can check if you were penalized, as well as disavow flagged backlinks, in the Google Search Console.

Hello Mike,

This may be hurting your presence on one or the other site. Duplicate content is typically frowned upon. You can get around this by simply assigning a canonical URL in the head of the HTML. A canonical URL tag tells the search engine "hey, the content is also accessible here but the official page is actually at example.com".

I went ahead and checked the HTML of both pages and they already have a canonical URL set to the main website address you posted. So it looks like you're good to go!

No problem Liana.

1. That is correct. Google understands that you don't have control of 3rd party sites, so instead of penalizing you, they minimize/ delete the effect the spam site links have.
2. Yes, but only kind of. It may or may not increase PA/ DA, but according to Google it shouldn't hurt you.

But yeah that's the gist of it! Instead taking the time investigating and disavowing links, you could spend that time cultivating relationships with other websites and businesses that could give you nice quality linkage.

Hope this answer works for you.

I should also clarify, these may hurt you if they are your only links. If you have very little equitable links, this may cause Google and other search engines to falsely recognize you as spam. So just be careful and be on the look out for extra suspicious spam links. The balanced approach is the best approach: don't worry but stay aware!

Here is a more technical write-up from Moz that I reccomend: https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score

Personally, I would use the one domain. And from what you've said, you would prefer it as well.

Thankfully, rankings are on a domain basis and not an IP basis, so there would be no issue in the first scenario. If you are duplicating and synchronizing the servers, you are better off using the one domain because you aren't creating two separate websites with differing content (UK English vs US English).

Do you have the bandwidth or ability to produce separate versions (for each domain) for each area you want to target? If not you are best off generalizing your website to target all English users instead of en-US, en-GB, etc. You're going to have to evaluate your geotargeting goals and budget.