Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Save 36% now!
      Moz Pro

      Save 36% now!

      Sign up
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      Save 36% now!
      Moz Pro

      Save 36% now!

      Sign up
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing
      Moz API

      Access 20 years of data with flexible pricing

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4. How to detect a bad neighborhood links?

    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.

    How to detect a bad neighborhood links?

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
    4
    6
    6555
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Valarlf
      Valarlf last edited by

      I have the feeling that I am suffering from negative seo, so there is a way to get a list of links that should remove in the google disavow links tool ?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Valarlf
        Valarlf @riplash last edited by

        just what I was looking for thanks

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • riplash
          riplash last edited by

          You might want to also check out these posts.

          http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-profile-tool-to-discover-linking-activity

          http://seogadget.com/bad-backlink-checking/

          SEOGadget also have a free tool you might find useful - http://tools.seogadget.co.uk/ - you can export your backlink data from OSE/GWT/Majestic/etc and feed them into the tool 200 links at a time.

          Valarlf 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Valarlf
            Valarlf last edited by

            Thank you very much to you both for your answers.

            Question Answered

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • SEO5Team
              SEO5Team last edited by

              Good Question Luis,

              Suggested Process below:

              • Get a list of all your backlinks
              • Make a list of all the known bad neighborhoods. You might have to research SEO blogs for this info
              • Compare that with your list of backlinks
              • You can also manually check any site to see if it is indexed in Google or not to confirm it's negative impact.

              Here is a link to a useful post to get you started

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Klarke
                Klarke last edited by

                This is not something you want to leave up to automation.  You need human input to decide whether a link is bad.  Disavowing innocent links will do more harm than good.

                So you have to go through your link profile and focus on the domains that link to you the most, then move onto the ones that link to you with non-branded anchor text.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                Got a burning SEO question?

                Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                Start my free trial


                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • Caffeine_Marketing

                  Internal links to landing pages

                  Hi, we are in the process of building a new website and we have 12 different locations and for theses 12 locations we have landing pages with unique copy on the following: 1. Marketing...2 SEO....3. PPC....4. Web Design Therefor there are 48 landing pages.  The marketing pages are the most important ones to us in terms of traffic and priority.  My question is: 1. Should we put a dropdown of the are pages in the main header under locations that link to the area marketing pages? 2. What is the best way to link all the sub pages such as London Web Design?  Should these links just be coming off the London marketing page? or should we have a sitemap in the footer that lists every page? Thanks

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Caffeine_Marketing
                  0
                • Kingalan1

                  How Many Links to Disavow at Once When Link Profile is Very Spammy?

                  We are using link detox (Link Research Tools) to evaluate our domain for bad links. We ran a Domain-wide Link Detox Risk report. The reports showed a "High Domain DETOX RISK" with the following results: -42% (292) of backlinks with a high or above average detox risk
                  -8% (52) of backlinks with an average of below above average detox risk
                  -12% (81) of backlinks with a low or very low detox risk
                  -38% (264) of backlinks were reported as disavowed. This look like a pretty bad link profile. Additionally, more than 500 of the 689 backlinks are "404 Not Found", "403 Forbidden", "410 Gone", "503 Service Unavailable". Is it safe to disavow these? Could Google be penalizing us for them> I would like to disavow the bad links, however my concern is that there are so few good links that removing bad links will kill link juice and really damage our ranking and traffic. The site still  ranks for terms that are not very competitive. We receive about 230 organic visits a week. Assuming we need to disavow about 292 links, would it be safer to disavow 25 per month while we are building new links so we do not radically shift the link profile all at once? Also, many of the bad links are 404 errors or page not found errors. Would it be OK to run a disavow of these all at once? Any risk to that? Would we be better just to build links and leave the bad links ups? Alternatively, would disavowing the bad links potentially help our traffic? It just seems risky because the overwhelming majority of links are bad.

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
                  0
                • Harbor_Compliance

                  Wikipedia links - any value?

                  Hello everyone.  We recently posted some of our research to Wikipedia as references in the "External Links" section.  Our research is rigorous and has been referenced by a number of universities and libraries (an example: https://www.harborcompliance.com/information/company-suffixes.php).  Anyway, I'm wondering if these Wikipedia links have any value beyond of course adding to the Wiki page's information.  Thanks!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Harbor_Compliance
                  0
                • masterfish

                  Is CloudFlare bad for SEO?

                  I have been hit by DDoS attacks lately...not on a huge scale, but probably done by some "script kiddies" or competitors of mine. Still, I need to take some action in order to protect my server and my site against all of this spam traffic that is being sent to it. In the process of researching the tools available for defending a website from a DDoS attack, I came across the service offered by CloudFlare.com. According to the CloudFlare website, they protect your site against a DDoS attack by showing users/visitors they find suspicious an interstitial that asks them if they are a real user or a bot...this interstitial contains a Captcha that suspicious users are asked to enter in order to visit the site. I'm just wondering what kind of an effect such an interstitial could have on my Google rankings...I can imagine that such a thing could add to increased click-backs to the SERPs and, if Google detects this, to lower rankings. Has anyone had experience with the DDoS protection services offered by CloudFlare, who can say a word or two regarding any effects this may have on SEO? Thanks

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | masterfish
                  1
                • mtthompsons

                  Dummy links in posts

                  Hi, Dummy links in posts. We use 100's of sample/example lnks as below http://<domain name></domain name> http://localhost http://192.168.1.1 http:/some site name as example which is not available/sample.html many more is there any tag we can use to show its a sample and not a link and while we scan pages to find broken links they are skipped and not reported as 404 etc? Thanks

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mtthompsons
                  0
                • nbeske

                  Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design

                  I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text. I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links. I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)? I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP. Should I? 1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain. 2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites. 3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nbeske
                  0
                • raybiswa

                  How to ping the links

                  When i do link building for my website, how can i let the search engines know about that. is there any way of pinging?

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | raybiswa
                  0
                • bodaclick

                  Does 302 pass link juice?

                  Hi! We have our content under two subdomains, one for the English language and one for Spanish. Depending on the language of the browser, there's a 302 redirecting to one of this subdomains. However, our main domain (which has no content) is receiving a lot of links - people rather link to mydomain.com than to en.mydomain.com. Does the 302 passing any link juice? If so, to which subdomain? Thank you!

                  Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bodaclick
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.