Moz Spam Analysis vs. GWMT Links to Your Site

[GoogleDowner]

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!

[PatrickDelehanty]

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!