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 Score & Redirecting Inbound Links
-
Hi,
I recently downloaded a spreadsheet of inbound links to my client sites and am trying to 301 redirect the ones that are formatted incorrectly or just bad links in general (they all link to the site domain, but they used to have differently formatted urls on their old site, or the link URL in general has strange stuff on it).
My question is, should I even bother redirecting these links if their spam score is a little high (i.e. 20-40%)? it already links to the existing domain, just with a differently formatted URL. I just want to make sure it goes to a valid URL on the site, but I don't want to redirect to a valid URL if it's going to harm the client's SEO. Also not sure what to do about the links with the --% spam score.
I really appreciate any input as I don't have a lot of experience with how to deal with spammy links.
-
Hi Ali,
Yeah, I would agree that it is a spammy site. When I tried visiting it, I went through a lot of redirects and ended up on some random page. I would disavow the domain and still implement 301 redirects.
-
Hi Mazen,
Thank you so much for your reply.
Here's an example of a domain with a 43% spam score: 123coolpictures.com. The DA is 26 though. Still seems like a spammy site?
-
Hi,
A spam score of 20%-40% doesn't necessarily mean that the backlink is bad/spammy. It's only an indication - you can read more about MOZ's spam score calculation here.
I would strongly advise implementing 301 redirects because the old URL can have more valuable backlinks that you still can't see. As good as MOZ's crawler is, it won't pick up everything Google does.
If you're worried about a certain link being spammy, I would go visit it and see what kind of website/page it's sitting on and if it does turn out to be pure spam, you can Disavow that link from Google Search Console. Otherwise, I'd keep the link.
Hope that helps!
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
-
Sitewide nav linking from subdomain to main domain
I'm working on a site that was heavily impacted by the September core update. You can see in the attached image the overall downturn in organic in 2019 with a larger hit in September bringing Google Organic traffic down around 50%. There are many concerning incoming links from 50-100 obviously spammy porn-related websites to just plain old unnatural links. There was no effort to purchase any links so it's unclear how these are created. There are also 1,000s of incoming external links (most without no-follow and similar/same anchor text) from yellowpages.com. I'm trying to get this fixed with them and have added it to the disavow in the meantime. I'm focusing on internal links as well with a more specific question: If I have a sitewide header on a blog located at blog.domain.com that has links to various sections on domain.com without no-follow tags, is this a possible source of the traffic drops and algorithm impact? The header with these links is on every page of the blog on the previously mentioned subdomain. **More generally, any advice as to how to turn this around? ** The website is in the travel vertical. 90BJKyc
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ShawnW0 -
How does Google determine if a link is paid or not?
We are currently doing some outreach to bloggers to review our products and provide us with backlinks (preferably followed). The bloggers get to keep the products (usually about $30 worth). According to Google's link schemes, this is a no-no. But my question is, how would Google ever know if the blogger was paid or given freebies for their content? This is the "best" article I could find related to the subject: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2332787/Matt-Cutts-Shares-4-Ways-Google-Evaluates-Paid-Links The article tells us what qualifies as a paid link, but it doesn't tell us how Google identifies if links were paid or not. It also says that "loans" or okay, but "gifts" are not. How would Google know the difference? For all Google knows (maybe everything?), the blogger returned the products to us after reviewing them. Does anyone have any ideas on this? Maybe Google watches over terms like, "this is a sponsored post" or "materials provided by 'x'". Even so, I hope that wouldn't be enough to warrant a penalty.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jampaper0 -
Cross linking websites of the same company, is it a good idea
As a user I think it is beneficial because those websites are segmented to answer to each customer needs, so I wonder if I should continue to do it or avoid it as much as possible if it damages rankings...
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | mcany0 -
Off-page SEO and link building
Hi everyone! I work for a marketing company; for one of our clients' sites, we are working with an independent SEO consultant for on-page help (it's a large site) as well as off-page SEO. Following a meeting with the consultant, I had a few red flags with his off-page practices – however, I'm not sure if I'm just inexperienced and this is just "how it works" or if we should shy away from these methods. He plans to: guest blog do press release marketing comment on blogs He does not plan to consult with us in advance regarding the content that is produced, or where it is posted. In addition, he doesn't plan on producing a report of what was posted where. When I asked about these things, he told me they haven't encountered any problems before. I'm not saying it was spam-my, but I'm more not sure if these methods are leaning in the direction of "growing out of date," or the direction of "black-hat, run away, dude." Any thoughts on this would be crazy appreciated! Thanks, Casey
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | CaseyDaline0 -
Rollover design & SEO
After reading this article http://www.seomoz.org/blog/designing-for-seo some questions came up from my developers. In the article it says "One potential solution to this problem is a mouse-over. Initially when viewed, the panel will look as it does on the left hand side (exactly as the designer want it), yet when a user rolls over the image the panel changes into what you see on the right hand side (exactly what the SEO wants)." My developers say" Having text in the rollovers is almost like hiding text and everyone knows in SEO that you should never hide text. "In the article he explains that it is not hidden text since its visible & readable by the engines.What are everyone's thoughts on this? Completely acceptable or iffy?Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | DCochrane0 -
Site being targeted by hardcore porn links
We noticed recently a huge amount of referral traffic coming to a client's site from various hard cord porn sites. One of the sites has become the 4th largest referrer and there are maybe 20 other sites sending traffic. I did a Whois look up on some of the sites and they're all registered to various people & companies, most of them are pretty shady looking. I don't know if the sites have been hacked or are deliberately sending traffic to my client's site, but it's obviously a concern. The client's site was compromised a few months ago and had a bunch of spam links inserted into the homepage code. Has anyone else seen this before? Any ideas why someone would do this, what the risks are and how we fix it? All help & suggestions greatly appreciated, many thanks in advance. MB.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | MattBarker0 -
DropBox.com High PA & DA?
"What’s up with these dl.dropbox.com High PA & DA links?" You know, It's frustrating to spend almost an entire day getting a few great link backs... then to find out your competitor has hundreds of cheap & easy link backs for the keyword you are going for with greater Authority [according to SEOmoz's OSE]. So I ran a search on one of our top competitors in Open Site Explorer to gather an idea of where the heck they are getting all of their links. Please feel free to copy my actions so you can see what I see. Run a search in OSE for www[dot]webstaurantstore[dot]com. Click on the ‘Anchor Text’ Tab. Click on the first Anchor Text Term, which should be ‘restaurant supplies’ :: Then it will expand, click on the ‘View more links and details in the inbound links section.’ As you scroll down the list you will notice that they have a bunch of linking pages from dl.dropbox.com, all of them are .pdb files, for their targeted Anchor Text, restaurant supplies. Q: So my question is can someone please elaborate on what .pdb files are and how they are getting this to work for them so well? Also you will notice, on the expanded Anchor Text Page, that their 6<sup>th</sup> most powerful link for this phrase (restaurant supplies) seems to be linked straight from a porn site, I thought Google does not rank adult sites like this? Q: For future reference, does anyone know legitimate websites to maybe file an SEO manipulation complaint? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Burkett.com0
