Editor’s note: “Ask an SEO” is a weekly column by technical SEO expert Jenny Halasz. Come up with your hardest SEO question and fill out our form. You might see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!
Welcome to another edition of Ask an SEO! Today’s question comes from João B. in Portugal. He asks:
Should I disavow from my backlink profile (with GSC) a link that comes from a site with very low DA, but that is related to the theme of my company (no signal of spam) and that sends a lot of traffic?
Could you help us with this?
I want to congratulate you; I’m pretty sure this is the only question we’ve ever gotten that doesn’t have an “it depends” answer.
The answer is absolutely not. Don’t disavow a link unless it is spam.
Remember, any link value from a third-party tool (DA is Domain Authority and is specific to the Moz link tool), is an estimate of the link’s relative value. In most cases, this is determined by the links into a site.
Just because a site doesn’t have a good link rating doesn’t mean it’s a bad site. If the site is relevant to your business and sends quality traffic, it’s a good site.
SEO people worry so much about search guidelines sometimes that they forget to use common sense. You’re not alone in this at all.
But there are other things besides search traffic. And there are lots of reasons to make decisions other than SEO.
Think about it this way:
If you had a guy who came into your store every day wearing something embarrassing – maybe clown shoes – but every time he came in, he bought 10x what the average person does, would you ask him not to come in anymore?
Of course, you wouldn’t.
Similarly, you shouldn’t turn down a free source of good traffic. Just because they have no links now doesn’t mean they always won’t.
If anything, it’s great to have a solid source of traffic outside of Google.
Google may send 80 percent or more of your traffic, but that may not always be the case. Anyone who is significantly reliant on Google traffic should try to diversify.
Rather than think about whether you should disavow traffic from a source like that, you should be thinking about how you can increase traffic from that source or convert that traffic better.
Have a question about SEO for Jenny? Fill out this form or use #AskAnSEO on social media.
More Resources:
- High-Quality Links vs. Low-Quality Links: What’s the Difference?
- Too Many Links: Strategies for Disavow & Cleanup
- Google: Focus on Search Console Data When Disavowing Bad Links
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Paulo Bobita
