When I first started SEO there were 3 big guns in three search marketing world.

• Majestic for Backlinks.
• Mox for SEO
• SEMRush for SEM

I still think those 3 are they best in their realm, and with an unlimited budget, I would pay for all 3. But I don't have an unlimited budget, and I to had to pick just one, so I set out to do some research like you did. Upon further review, I did found that someone actually basically did the baclkink study for me!

http://www.analyticsseo.com/blog/link-data-research-majestic-seo-moz-linkscape-ahrefs-part-2/

They all have their pro's and con's, but for me, Moz seemed to be the best bet. I looked at is as an investment. I felt that in the long run, the quality of links that Moz were finding was more important than the extra links that Ahrefs or Majestic were finding. My second thought was that as all these companies grow, Moz, seemed adapting to the needs of modern SEO better than the other companies. So after weighing the pro's and con's I figured it was worth it and would only be a matter of time before Moz's backlink tool was more powerful, or would outshine the others simply because of efficacy.

So far, I am pleased.

As I said, with an unlimited budget, I would have all 3 programs. Moz, SEMRush, & Majestic. I can't, so I choose Moz, any day.

Hope that helps.

I would agree with Don. Matt Cutts, who is pretty much the authority of all of this, has answered this question. Granted it was 7 years ago I think the answer is still valid.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6-KA20QqL8\

Quantity is important for people, quality is important for google.

UPDATE

So as of 7/9 I have removed 423 Tags and redirected them to 2 of the our main tags.

I isolated the 2 most effective tags and  spread them across the 160 posts that we have. I limited it to one tag per post as to not create duplicate content, and because I am leaning towards removing tags all together.

Part of the other reason that I am doing this is because our categories seem to be gaining more traction than our tags.

My thought moving forward would be to take all of these, and fold them into the categories.

My Audit reads as follows:

• Pages Crawled dropped from 624-240
• High Priority Issues Dropped from 42-4
• Medium Priority Issues Dropped from 141-102

It is much to early to tell how things are going with traffic. Our visits are down 2% (and nobody checks into rehab until at least a week or 2 after the holiday weekend) but our keywords sending visits are up 9.

I will keep you all informed!

Update

I have officially removed ALL TAGS. I also found out that our previous web guy had placed some syntax in the .htaccess which was altering the way the URL was displaying domains, so in the url, there was no "tag" pages. Which was news to me! Previous I had been using a quick redirect plugin, but with the amount of 301's I figured it was time to upgrade to .htaccess and plug them in there.

It has been a few weeks since the changes.

• Pages Crawled 194
• High Priority Issues: 9
• Medium Priority Issues: 324 (although I know what the cause of this was, and won't be in the next audit)

And for the first time in a little over a month that I have been working here we finally saw green in the amount of traffic that we are getting! We are up 4%

Thanks again for all your help!

SEO is no longer about strictly writing for Google. In fact, SEO has become more and more about PR and Marketing. So looking at your possible outcomes

1 Article:

• From an SEO perspective the further down the page, the lower the value. You would certainly have A LOT of keywords and a lot of content, but you may suffer from keyword cannibalism and end up not really optimizing for any one keyword. Potential for lots of linking, etc.
• From an end user perspective, if this wasn't a research paper on something I was incredibly passionate about, it would be hard to read.

10 Articles:

• From an SEO perspective your article isn't nearly as dense but you potentially gain 10 pages as opposed to one. That poses a link issue and makes the linking a little more difficult but very doable.
• From an end user perspective it drives me totally BANANAS when I have to keep clicking through an article after every 10 words. However, when done properly, and spaced out correctly, it feels just like turning the page.

Just my thoughts. I would lean toward the 10 articles, I think there is also more marketing potential there. Spacing it out, turning it into a 10 day release, etc.

Hey everybody,

I am seeing some confusing results. I am seeing that in the back of our Search Console we are showing around 4,500 sites indexed.

If I use the "site" operator in google, only 2820 show up... any thoughts as to why that happens?

Well, we have taken the big parts, like the valuable metas, and made sure those were visible, and over the next month or two we are slowly adding pieces of the content back into the main portion of the page.

A lot of the content was just fluff, and really wasn't helping us. Our original website was 600 pages, of those 600 pages only about 40 were actually ranking, so what we did across the board was make new pages to exemplify our services better, with better URL's, better optimization etc, then we took the old pages that were currently ranked, and brought them over UNTOUCHED with the same url and are putting them in the blog section.

Over the next month, we will slowly be pushing people to the pages we want people to be landing on. So, essentially, all of the ranked content is still on the site, in one way or another, in as untouched as possible. We also added new, optimized content, that is now the core of our website, and did a lot of outside marketing to help add to the potential traffic loss from a site redesign.

We relaunched on Sunday, and so far our numbers are pretty on par! So, we will see, I will keep you updated!

-Evan

Matt Cutts on Sitewide Backlins That pretty much will tell you everything you want to know.

As far as the domains being spammy, really that's going to have to be a personal decision. Just because the word directory is in the name, it isn't a spam site. Just because there is a hyphen, doesn't make it spam. Google is progressively becoming more and more powerful, and more and more capable at telling what is real, and what isn't.

Visit those websites, do they look like spam to you? Do they look like a directory listing site do you? If you worked at google, and had to do a site audit, would you ding someone for linking those sites?

Really for all intensive purposes wikipedia was a directory, and then it started getting powerful, and gaining traction, and then it was being abused.

Anyway, I guess to answer your question, you will have to look at the websites to actually know the answer. Is the website functioning as merely a place to gather links? Then yes, it is probably spam.

EDIT: Also, at first I thought this was a competitor analysis, but considering that you are mentioning disavow, I will presume this is for you. The disavow tool is VERY powerful, and I would use it very sparingly. Do what you can to organically remove the links before disavowing them. Not only that but if you still have links from these sources, you are still getting some sort of juice, so build a bridge before burning a bridge. Replace those links with new ones, from legit sources. Write some press releases, post some solid social media, reach out to bloggers etc.

EGOL strikes again! That was my thought.

It would be better to remove the tags and do a 301 as opposed to remove them from the index with the URL Removal tool? Or are you saying add a 301 to them?