Disavow 60% of the external links?

[Andreea-M]

Hi guys,

We just discovered that our website got a 16% Spam Score based on MOZ reports, while less than 1 year ago we had a good 1% if I'm not mistaken. Therefore we ran an audit of the external links to our website and discovered that about 60% of them are irrelevant such as:

• referral page not available anymore (or not found, or domain not accessible)
• irrelevant web directories for our business

Impossible to contact the owner of these pages or remove the links towards our website.
Is the Disavow tool an acceptable option in this case? Could this lower our Spam Score and make a better impression in "Google's eyes"? 60% seems quite a lot of backlinks, but they are also not relevant, and we want to focus on creating better quality referrals in the next months.

I would really appreciate an opinion on this, and how would you proceed in this case.

[ClaytonJ]

Hi

Disavow should be a last resort.

The Spam score is a guide ONLY.  It is a wake-up call to investigate.  As you have done examine each link where possible individually.  It appears no action is required based on your findings.

That said the first queries are - is your site ranking well? have there been any large dips or a noticeable decline?  Can you clarify?

I add if so then need to undertake a full technical audit, so not a disavow yet..

Regards

[meghanpahinui]

Hi there!

Thanks so much for the question! I do want to make sure to point out that Spam Score is not dependent on your backlinks. Spam Score is  the percentage of sites with similar characteristics to yours which have been banned or penalized by Google. We calculate this based on 27 common factors we identified.

Disavowing links isn't the best way to improve your Spam Score in Link Explorer. If you're looking to improve that score, I would recommend understanding the 27 factors that make up this score and working on improving those: https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score

In addition, disavowing links will not remove the links from you backlink profile in Moz. Since disavowing a link doesn't take it away, it would still appear in our link index.

We also have a great blog post which may help: https://moz.com/blog/do-we-still-need-to-disavow-penguin

I hope all this info helps! If you have further questions or if you need anything else, please feel free to reach out to help@moz.com

[HashtagHustler]

Check this post out. In reference to a similar question.

Basically the TLDR is that unless it looks like blatant PBN/SPAM/Manipulation google doesn't seem to concerned.  I have plenty of backlink that are 75% spam score and higher. Obviously I don't recommend looking for links that are super high spam score but I would put your effort into link acquisition as opposed to link cleanup.

[Andreea-M]

Thank you very much for all your insights! I'll look into each of them and it's good to know there's no need to disavow most of the referral links. The website is doing pretty well actually (ranking keeps improving in the last months), so I guess the next step would be to focus on building better quality links. Thanks again for all your opinions!

[ClaytonJ]

Hi A

Well done, you are 100% on the right track.  Go get em.

Regards