Spam Score & Redirecting Inbound Links

[AliMac26]

Hi,

I recently downloaded a spreadsheet of inbound links to my client sites and am trying to 301 redirect the ones that are formatted incorrectly or just bad links in general (they all link to the site domain, but they used to have differently formatted urls on their old site, or the link URL in general has strange stuff on it).

My question is, should I even bother redirecting these links if their spam score is a little high (i.e. 20-40%)? it already links to the existing domain, just with a differently formatted URL. I just want to make sure it goes to a valid URL on the site, but I don't want to redirect to a valid URL if it's going to harm the client's SEO. Also not sure what to do about the links with the --% spam score.

I really appreciate any input as I don't have a lot of experience with how to deal with spammy links.

[WebQuest]

Hi,

A spam score of 20%-40% doesn't necessarily mean that the backlink is bad/spammy. It's only an indication - you can read more about MOZ's spam score calculation here.

I would strongly advise implementing 301 redirects because the old URL can have more valuable backlinks that you still can't see. As good as MOZ's crawler is, it won't pick up everything Google does.

If you're worried about a certain link being spammy, I would go visit it and see what kind of website/page it's sitting on and if it does turn out to be pure spam, you can Disavow that link from Google Search Console. Otherwise, I'd keep the link.

Hope that helps!

[AliMac26]

Hi Mazen,

Thank you so much for your reply.

Here's an example of a domain with a 43% spam score: 123coolpictures.com. The DA is 26 though. Still seems like a spammy site?

[WebQuest]

Hi Ali,

Yeah, I would agree that it is a spammy site. When I tried visiting it, I went through a lot of redirects and ended up on some random page.  I would disavow the domain and still implement 301 redirects.