Today’s Ask an SEO question comes from David Crowell, Ireland, who asks:
“In reviewing my and my competitor’s backlink profiles, I found many links from the firebaseapp.com and web.app domains.
These domains have high DA, but the pages are often spam and of low quality. I instinctively reject these links, but I’m not sure how to proceed due to the high DA.
Do you have any advice for SEOs when they encounter bad links from high DA domains? “
Hi David,
good question!The first thing to consider is Domain Authority (DA) not from Google and is not a reliable indicator.
How Does Domain Authority Affect Your Link Denial Policy?
DA is a calculation method designed by a popular SEO tool, used only by this tool (and not by Google) Evaluation website.
If you trust the tool, then you can use this metric as a way to start seeing if domains or specific pages and backlinks have some value.
But I personally wouldn’t let a high DA get in my way. There are a lot of high authority domains that you probably don’t want backlinks to.
Porn sites and gambling sites may have a lot of domain authority and content that can drive a lot of engagement, but that doesn’t mean backlinks may be good for you (unless you’re in those domains).
I found a link to a fashion site where I work in their cosplay section from a porn site with a high DA and we turned it down because we didn’t want the association even though the link was natural and made the end user benefit.
So what should we look at?
It’s more important to see how Google will view the link.
Ask yourself why the site is linking to you – does your business sell something related to the site’s theme, category theme, or page content?
If you sell something unrelated, like plumbing supplies or a service alarm system, Google may question why you have a link from that site.
They will either ignore the link or they may demean your site because it may look like what you are building Spam link.
If this high DA site or series of sites has a lot of outbound links, there’s a good chance Google knows it’s part of a farm, and may ignore the link on its own.
If you’re concerned about these links, you can always add them to your disavow form if it makes you feel more comfortable. Denial only takes a second, inner peace can last a long time.
That’s why I still do it for my clients.
For your app specific question: If you think this is an attack on your site, or a fan of your brand and decide to link to your developer from all their apps or sites, you can leave it alone.
Most likely they also link to all of your competitors, or your site is contextually relevant to the site theme.
If you do decide to trust a tool’s metrics (they all have their own), then I’d pull up the report linking to your specific URL (not the base domain) and look at that page’s score.
If the score is good and the content makes sense, I’ll keep the link.If it’s clearly spam and off topic, I’ll consider it Deny pages or entire domains To save time.
You can go a step further and pull similar reports for your top three competitors in Google searches to see if they have similar backlinks. If they do, then it’s probably clear to you that everyone in your space has the same problem.
In this case, focus on things you can control, such as On-page SEO with your content, page structure, architecture, internal linking, speed and user experience.
Do you really need to worry about disavowing links?
Google does a better job of detecting quality backlinks while ignoring spam backlinks, including high DA sites.
If the link is obviously not natural and only points to your site, disavow and do it domain-wide.
Again, peace of mind is something that can positively impact your business and personal life, so it’s definitely worth it to take a few seconds to add the URL to your disavow file and upload it – but only if you’re sure it’s a spam link and from Unrelated site/page/source.
I hope this answers your question and thank you for asking it.
It’s always more fun to tackle these subjective questions – you make me so happy! =0)
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Editor’s Note: Ask about SEO is a weekly SEO advice column written by the industry’s top SEO experts handpicked by Search Engine Magazine. Have questions about SEO? fill out our form. You may see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!
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