Josh Meeder

Disavowing Spamming Backlinks & Why You Should Consider It

Spam Scores, Backlinks, SEO and Things You May Not Be Aware Of

Your site may be suffering from hidden and unknown back links. Backlinks, or incoming or inbound links, are links from outside websites to pages on your own domain. You could have a high Spam Score. There is a significant abuse from spammers that build lists and pages of thousands of links. Until you check, you may never know how bad it is. I was completely surprised at the number of bad / spam links were pointing to my site, and how badly it was affecting my search results.

What is a Spam Score?

A Spam scoremeasures the penalties that are assessed to a website by Google. Scores ranges from 1-100%. Anything below 30% is considered a Low, 31% to 60% is considered Medium and 61% and above is considers a high Spam Score.

MOZ, a long standing company in the SEO and research field, worked on this Spam Score Project. It become a tool tool that enables Google to rank or penalize (i.e. blacklist) your website. It does this by analyzing the several link sources: subdomains, fake websites and backlinks. Your site may be penalized without you even knowing it, or even doing anything to create the situation.

How Do I Get My Website’s Spam Score?

MOZ has the “MozBar” extension“MozBar” extension for the Chrome browser. Chrome is the easiest and really only way to use the MozBar. AND….. It has to be on Laptop or Desktop. Sorry, but Chrome extensions are not available on Tablet or Mobile. I suggest pinning it to the top of your extensions bar. You will need to sign up for a free account and make sure that third party cookies are not blocked on the site you are checking.

Once you are configured, just open your site in a Chrome window then launch the MozBar extension. You will see your Domain Authority, Page Authority and Spam Score. All of these are important for your site’s success.

What is Domain Authority?

According to MOZ’s website:

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). Domain Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to greater likelihood of ranking.

Domain Authority is based on data from our Link Explorer web index and uses dozens of factors in its calculations. The actual Domain Authority calculation itself uses a machine learning model to predictively find a “best fit” algorithm that most closely correlates our link data with rankings across thousands of actual search results that we use as standards to scale against.

What is Page Authority?

Again, from the MOZ website:

Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP). Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

What You Can Do and Improve Your Spam Score

The process is called “Disavowing Backlinks” and is done through Google’s Search ConsoleGoogle’s Search Console by uploading text file with disavowed domains or pages. It is a relatively easy process, but you need to be careful you don’t disavow good inbound links. The link to the Search Console page is https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

With all of that said, Google has held the position that is in not necessary for a lot of sites and that it will not hurt ranking. They say their algorithms account for it. And they also buried it deep in Search Console. Link ranking algorithms are designed to create maps of the web that weed out spam sites. The bad pages linking to good pages become isolated, as no quality pages are send traffic back to them.

Even with those warnings, I run through this process on my site, GreatThingsLLC.com . With in a month of uploading the first disavow file, my MOZ Spam Score went from 43% to 8%. At the time of uploading this video, it was down to 1% Spam Score. The updates and disavowed domains are not instant. It may take a few weeks to see a change. Be patient and be diligent. It will help and your site’s result with show it.

You can decide for yourself. It made sense to clean up and remove those spammy links. If nothing else, it may make it a little easier for Google’s indexing.