Can we disavow all spammy looking sites in OSE with a spam score of 5 or above?

[BobGW]

Hello,

We'd like to use OSE to make a disavow list. Can we just go through everything with a spam score of 5 or higher that looks like spam when we visit the site and disavow all of them?

I'll be using Moz pro, are there any other free tools that I can utilize?

What do I keep in mind?

Thanks!

[Mobilio]

TL;DR - yes and no.

Long story - you can't disavow links only with spam score. All you need is to go and check manually with human is it look spammy or doesn't. Because tools can be easy fool and make legit sites to look spammy or vice versa. That's why you can't rely only on this machine generated number.

You also can use Majestic too. All you need is to verify your domain there and do export of domains and blind disavow all domains with TF < 1 and with ref. domains < 10. But you can change all domains with TF<5 or even TF<10. This give also good list of "bad" domains.

If you have enough time then you need to use SeachConsole, OpenSiteExplorer, Ahrefs, Majestic and WebMeUp. You need to signup and get all links for your domain (both fresh and historical). Then you need to export everything in CSV. Then merge all CSVs into one huge spreadsheet only for links; remove duplicate links and then to locate bad links with human inspection. Please check this article for useful tips:
https://moz.com/blog/5-spreadsheet-tips-for-manual-link-audits
Now bad news... this is slow and expensive process. But this is only way to make almost perfect link profile for your domain.

[Eric_Rohrback]

@Peter basically nails it. None of these tools will be completely accurate to what Google determines is a "bad" link, so it will be very subjective. You really should use a variety of tools (even link detox is a good one) to get a list of sites linking to you. The reason being is that all these tools have very different indexes, so you'll get a more comprehensive view of your profile... however that will be a little more expensive since you would need multiple subscriptions.

Like Peter said, you'd then want to download all the links into excel, dedupe, and review. I usually look at aHref Rank below a certain threshold and Trust Flow below a certain threshold (you need to either use a VLOOKUP or an INDEX/MATCH formula to combine the lists from all sources). After that you review those links manually, and add the "bad" ones to a disavow file. The "bad" ones are those that you would agree violates the Google Webmaster Quality Guidelines that fit into a link scheme definition. Once again, this is a subjective process so you'll really need to review the guidelines.

To do this analysis to the full extent that you'd want... I don't think there are free tools that will give you any meaningful data. Remember they need to maintain bots and their own software to expand their indexes, so the free trials will be very limited data (usually with no way to export). I'll also say this is a very tedious process and depending on the size of the site I would allocate anywhere between 5 (small site) and 40 hours (larger site) to tackle this process. Buffer in a little more if this is the first run, since there will be a learning curve for the tools and it will take time to put together a professional looking report.