What MOZ domain authority are considered bad links?

[jspinder15]

As a general rule of thumb, what MOZ domain authority are considered bad links? Ie., is it for sites that are 20 and below?

What is the DA floor where you should target links from?

[Chris.Menke]

Hi jspinder,

There's really no "bad DA", only bad sites. For example, a new site with low DA may end up being a better site for a link relationship than an old site with low DA. A domain with great DA may not be suitable for you to get a link from because it's its content is not relevant to yours, while a site with much lower DA may be a great site to earn a link from because it is directly relevant to your niche.

If you're a new site, look for relevance to your market before you look for DA. A small, relevant site with low DA is often much more likely to work with another small site and give "good" link than will a site with high DA--just because, that's how things work out there.

Learn your market. Learn your competitors. Learn the companies in your market that are complementary to your site. DA is a reflection of how good/creative of a businessperson you are in the real world. Backlinks and DA and rankings are really just a reflection of that.

[Paddy_Moogan]

Hi there,

You have a great answer from Chris, so I'll just add a few other points:

• Bad links can often have a high DA because someone may be leveraging a high DA website to spin out spammy links. For example, someone may drop spammy links onto a high DA forum. So be sure to look outside of DA when looking for low-quality links.
• DA is a Moz metric and whilst it is designed to help mimic what Google may use to score the authority of a website, it isn't what Google uses. So keep an eye on Google Search Console to see what links are reported by Google and do a manual check of these to see if you have any bad links.
• If you're building links, then using a minimum DA score can be useful when sorting and prioritising link targets. For example, if you have a list of 100 potential link targets, you could narrow that list down by sorting from high to low DA. But as Chris said, keep an eye on relevance too.

Hope that helps!

Paddy

[singham1221]

Agree!