A website with a spam score of 5 is back linking to me. How important is to get that link removed?

[absoauto]

There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?

[shopperlocal_DM]

it is not at all important if just 2% or 3% low quality websites are back linking. Search do understand these things and doesn't react to this. However, it can really be harmful if the percentage is really high, lets say 20% or more.

Though, you can still get that link removed or Disavowed it though GWT.

Hope this helps.

[RyanPurkey]

Hi Margaret. As discussed on the blog post here: http://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk the tool is just one facet of identifying what sites Google may consider spammy. A score of 5 is currently just outside of the green / ok part of the tool so it's likely very low risk.

In addition to the tool though, consider the site itself.

• Do they moderate their comments (deleting comment spam)?
• Is the link relevant?
• Is it on a page that is semantically aligned to what you do?
• Is the link text to your site accurate?
• Does there site get a lot of links from red / danger spam sites?

Those are just some of the things to consider. But it should become fairly clear with a little investigation.  Like Khem says, it's better to use the tool to identify trends, versus dissecting more granular details. Cheers!

[DirkC]

Hi Margaret,

You should read this review on the Moz spam tool written by Marie Haynes, who is quite knowledgeable on link removal & spammy links. Basically, the tool can be useful, when used in combination with other tools and with manually reviewing the links themselves. So don't take decisions only based on the score of the tool - Ryan made some valuable points on how to determine if a link is spammy. You should also read this post by Marie on how to identify unnatural links.

Based on these elements, you can make a decision whether or not to disavow these links.

rgds,

Dirk