Moz Spam Analysis vs. GWMT Links to Your Site
-
Hi Moz Community,
I have been conducting some link auditing and started comparing the Moz Spam Analysis tool with the links provided in Google WMT. It appears that the Moz Spam Analysis tools shows an aggregate of links that Moz may or may not consider spam, however when you download and look at Google's "Links to Your Site" list it provides every link iteration known to man that's pointing to the target website - without providing any hints as to whether or not a link may be considered spam by Google.
The biggest concern I have here is that Google is picking up a lot of links, which I consider spam, that do not appear in the Moz Spam Analysis results. I guess the question(s) I have are:
- Does it make sense to compare these two data sets?
- Has anyone else tried this comparison and how did you use the information to make positive changes?
- Any recommendations when it comes to determining if an external link is spam/hurting/helping a website?
Thank you!
-
Hi there
1. Yes, and go through a backlink audit - what needs to be removed / disavowed?
2. I used this combination of information (as well as Majestic / Ahrefs) for multiple audits / manual action clean ups
3. You can use tools like LinkRisk to assess your backlink profile and score individual links.All in all - the best way to define a bad link is to use your own intuition and common sense:
- Does this link help my website?
- Is this link relevant to my website?
- Would I trust this site (that's linking to me) if I landed on it?
- Is the website or content in which I am being linked from topically relevant to my website?
- If you check metrics - does anything about the metrics (domain authority, page authority,Majestic, SEMRush traffic/ranking data, etc) make me feel uneasy?
Hope this helps! Good luck!
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
-
Inbound external links
Hi I have a question about inbound external links The good news is that I have 135 inbound links showing up in open site explorer, where my main competitor has 4 The bad news is that these are not the links that I have been building myself. The links are sometimes in a foreign language, rarely in an entertainment category, which my website is, and there seems no way to add a link on the page. I did buy some links when I first started out, but I was advised not to do it again But these are clearly working despite their apparent lack of value Then the question is where are my web directory listings, social bookmarks, social media content and web 2.0 articles, and the links I found my competitor had, that I was able to add my own website on, I have manually grafted for these links, have I been wasting my time with all of these?.
Moz Pro | | singingtelegramsuk0 -
Facebook shared vs liked
Hi, looking at the "Open Site Explorer" I see : | Times Shared on Facebook: | 12 | 25 | 7 | 8 | -- |
Moz Pro | | KJMM
| Facebook Likes | 0 | 4 | 5 | 9 | -- | But what is the differencebetween Times Shared on Facebook and Facebook Likes??0 -
Open Site Explorer and link numbers
I know this question has been asked many times in this forum but I still can't work it out. Why does this link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.bookpal.com.au&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=subdomain&group=0 Which is showing all links, external, to pages "on this sub domain" show 1,935 external links but this link: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.bookpal.com.au&sort=page_authority&filter=follow&source=external&target=subdomain&group=0 which is exactly the same but this time shoing followed + 301 links, says "showing 1 - 50 external links) but won't show the total links (and I know the mouse-over on the question mark says it's won't show the total links, but I don't understand why it can't show the total links when it could show the total links when I requested to see "all links" instead of just "followed+301" links.) but it actually lists 700 links (14 pages, 50 results each page). I know the link list is limited to 25 links per domain but then it means you can NEVER know the total link count unless you download the full report. This makes using OSE to know numbers of links (internal, external, or otherwise) impossible. And if anyone uses the API, why the API (external+follow) returns 1,451 links? I'm sure it's an ongoing issue with people trying to get their head around all of this and I've never really been able to. Any insight would be much appreciated!
Moz Pro | | eatyourveggies0 -
I can't find any inbound links that I know I have on open site, ahref or majestic. Does anyone know why?
Since the linkscape update before Christmas I have built a couple of links to fairly high quality sites. I can't find them on open site though or the other tools I mentioned. I'm a bit concerned there is an issue with my site. Does anyone have any idea why? I'm stumped. My site: www.emporiumofmanliness.co.uk
Moz Pro | | EmpofMan0 -
In my crawl diagnostics, there are links to duplicate content. How can I track down where these links originated in?
How can I find out how SEOMOz found these links to begin with? That would help fix the issue. Where's the source page where the link was first encountered listed at?
Moz Pro | | kirklandsl0 -
Why Do Domain Link Metrics Differ in Keyword Difficulty Report vs OpenSiteExplorer
If anyone could shed some light on this that would be great. It seems as if the two tools are using different versions of the database?
Moz Pro | | belasco0 -
How accurate is Open Site Explorer?
I noticed for one of my sites, a large number of links do not show up in Open Site Explorer, including some of my stronger links. That being the case, how much weight can I put on using these tools to compare sites? I'm not trying to bash here, I really like the tools but if my PA is 29 and my competition is 34, how much weight can I put on these numbers? Or if it says my site has 50 links from 25 domains and my competition has 60 links from 30 domains, these numbers obviously aren't very accurate? So how much weight can I put on these comparisons? Are there better tools?
Moz Pro | | MattMaresca0