How Important is Domain Authority in Back-Link Audit
-
First off I just want to say thanks Penguin! Now I get to start the joyous experience doing a back-link audit, and removing all the negative links. Also I now have to be on constant alert for Black SEO tactics targeted at my domain due to the cut throat business I am in. I think it can only be a matter of time before Google says all backlinks do not matter. Unfortunately, I need rank now!!
So I have a couple of questions:
First how important is domain rank in a back-link audit? Should I remove myself from indexes with low domain rank, and leave ones with high? Should I remove myself from as many indexes as possible? What about obvious paid blog posts that have high domain rank? Do you leave those? What is considered a low Domain Rank for back-links, under 35 - 40?
Second, what is a good success rate for a back link audit. How can you measure improvement, other than waiting for your PR or SERP to go up?
Third, in some situations it looks like back-links are legitimate, but they all point to my home page. Is it worth pursuing for example asking these people to link to the specific product they are referring to for example children picnic tables instead of just our home page?
And, lastly what legal rights do I have to get back-links removed? Is it only on sites that copy my content that I have copy written? Is it possible to prevent Google from counting these back-links through an .htaccess file?
Thanks in advance for all of the help. I hope to take what I learn and put it into a guide of some capacity as I am sure many people are going through this same situation at the moment.
-
First how important is domain rank in a back-link audit? Should I remove myself from indexes with low domain rank, and leave ones with high? Should I remove myself from as many indexes as possible? What about obvious paid blog posts that have high domain rank? Do you leave those? What is considered a low Domain Rank for back-links, under 35 - 40?
This is a pretty open-ended question. Instead of judging your back links by domain authority, ask yourself about the nature of the link and the quality of the site. You should consider removing links from "obvious paid blog posts" regardless of domain authority.
Domain authority should not be viewed/used in a vacuum. In fact, if you're going to limit yourself to one metric, I might suggest mozTrust (although I wouldn't recommend relying solely on that either).
_Second, what is a good success rate for a back link audit. How can you measure improvement, other than waiting for your PR or SERP to go up? _
I suppose success should be measured in your ability to achieve your desired result. If you're truly facing a penalty situation, you should spend some time doing research before you begin to arbitrarily remove links. You might start here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-on-googles-penguin-update
In many instances, a perceived penguin penalty wasn't actually a penguin penalty. If you truly are facing this type of penalty, you may need to clean up your profile and submit a reconsideration request. Again, before you start removing links and submitting reconsideration requests, read up on this subject.
_Third, in some situations it looks like back-links are legitimate, but they all point to my home page. Is it worth pursuing for example asking these people to link to the specific product they are referring to for example children picnic tables instead of just our home page? _
Yes.
And, lastly what legal rights do I have to get back-links removed?
This is not intended, and should not be construed as legal advice. That being said, in most cases, it's not an issue of rights as much as it is an issue of practicality. Depending on how you're links were acquired, and from where they were acquired, it might be difficult enough to get a hold of the site owner, let alone try to take some sort of legal action to have links removed.
Is it possible to prevent Google from counting these back-links through an .htaccess file?
Not that I'm aware.
Best of 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
-
Will modifying an existing CNAME record effect my Domain Authority
I'm switching my hosting over from AWS to google cloud, will changing the CNAME record to point to the google cloud server effect my Domain Authority score?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Moeealii0 -
Links to external site (hotels link)
Hello, I am currently designing the webpages of my website and I am wondering if I should link externally or if it going to hurt me ? I am in the travel industry and for example in the France in the Loire valley, I want to list hotels that people can stay at in pre and pods trip. Is it ok to link to maybe 10 of those hotels websites or can it hurt me ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Contextual links (is this screen shot considered contextual /editorial links ?)
Hello, Is the screen shot below considered contextual ?https://imgur.com/a/mrbQq and does it have any value or no value What is the value on a scale from 0 to 10 (if you know) of a contextual link versus non contextual links. Thank you, mrbQq
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Links / Top Pages by Page Authority ==> pages shouldnt be there
I checked my site links and top pages by page authority. What i have found i dont understand, because the first 5-10 pages did not exist!! Should know that we launched a new site and rebuilt the static pages so there are a lot of new pages, and of course we deleted some old ones. I refreshed the sitemap.xml (these pages are not in there) and upload it in GWT. Why those old pages appear under the links menu at top pages by page authority?? How can i get rid off them? thx, Endre
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Neckermann0 -
Has anybody ever seen (or written) a case study on increasing domain authority?
I am an in-house digital marketer for a small business in the UK. The majority of our business comes from people finding us on Google's organic SERPs for relevant search terms. Our website has been around since 1999 and we have established a great base of keyword rankings in that time from key vanity keywords in our field that generate a tonne of long tail rankings for the product pages on our site. Last year, I was given the target of increasing our websites DA from 40(something) to 60+ by the end of the year. I put a plan together at the start of the year which included things like 'create awesome content', 'promote awesome content', do 'proper' link building, do 'real' PR, make sure technical SEO is all up to scratch, increase CTR, reduce bounce rate etc etc But... I wanted to find some examples of case studies where SEO's had taken a site with a starting DA of 'whatever' and increased it to 'a way higher whatever'. I found a tonne of 'How to increase your domain authority' type blog posts which said things like 'create awesome content', 'promote awesome content', 'do proper link building' etc etc but no hard data case studies from people who had been successful in doing it! I really just wanted to make sure that the plan I was putting together, was focused on the right things! Does anybody know of any case studies? I'm still keen to check them out. Being a small business, it's often the case that once we've put a plan together, we quickly realize that we don't have the resources, time, personnel or budget to follow it through but at lest having the plan confirmed by successful case studies doing the same thing or similar would really encouraging! Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RichAlive
Rich0 -
Possible to Improve Domain Authority By Improving Content on Low Page Rank Pages?
My sites domain authority is only 23. The home page has a page authority of 32. My site consists of about 400 pages. The topic of the site is commercial real estate (I am a real estate broker). A number of the sites we compete against have a domain authority of 30-40. Would our overall domain authority improved if we re-wrote the content for several hundred of pages that had the lowest page authority (say 12-15)? Is the overall domain authority derived by an average of the page authority of each page on a domain? Alternatively could we increase domain authority by setting the pages with the lowest page authority to "no index". By the way our domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com Thanks, Alan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
Impact of Domain Authority on Keyword ranking
Experts Please advise if there is any impact on Keyword rankings due to high or low Domain authority?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | INN0 -
Link Building
We have just recently launched a new website in Australia and as l am new to the SEO community, l was looking for a little advice on link building. Where is best to start? There are not many authorative websites for our industry. Are there specific websites that are good to link to? Are there any good tools to assist with this? Any help would be great. Thank you.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RobSchofield0