Disabled Trackbacks and Comments, now I need to clean up

[ProductPearson]

I have been analysing my Moz Ratings in comparison to competitors, and other sites with much less links have a higher authority and high moz rating/trust score. I believe this is down to my poor backlinks which I have found to be due to trackback/comment spam on my wordpress site. I have completely disabled comments and trackbacks/pingbacks on the site through the settings and theme files. According to recent links on Moz OSE, the spamming has stopped pretty much, so what should I do now to remove these spam like sites? I can't really contact them as they are literally spam sites with many thousands of links. Should I simply disavow the domains? we don't seem to have a Google penalty as of yet, but I fear we might get one, or our Moz rankings/SEO placements will be affected if we don't deal with this soon.

I used the plugin: Disable Comments and that disabled Comments, Pingbacks and Trackbacks on the site. I did however notice it was still enabled in some areas. I then used Simple Trackback Disabler, and that allowed me to remove them from all existing posts, pages etc. It also allowed me to delete 800+ current trackbacks that it seemed to detect.

Next move?

[GPainter]

I'll refer to a link by Jeff Finkelstein from a previous Q&A

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2309486/Matt-Cutts-Use-the-Link-Disavow-Tool-Even-if-Your-Site-Hasnt-Been-Penalized

Basically you can disavow before you get a penalty,

Just make sure they don't add some sort of value to your site as even some low end links are normal in a back link profile.

Hope that helps, good luck

[evolvingSEO]

Hey Ashley

I want to just clarify - do you mean to say people were spamming links to your site in order to receive automatic trackbacks from your site? Otherwise, having comment/trackback spam on your site is a separate issue from having incoming spammy links.

So, if your automatic trackbacks were like a magnet attracting poor links, and you have now shut off this function, in theory the bad links should spot coming in, which they seem to have stopped. So your next step as Chris suggests is to disavow all the bad domains.

But aside from that, in general I would think you would want comments and maybe even trackbacks to be active on your site, in which case I would enable them but require moderator approval on all first-time comments/trackbacks - this should deter spammers etc.

Then what you also want to do in order to activate comments is go through all of your old posts and completely delete all comment and trackback spam and leave only the real ones.

-Dan