Jack_napier_fallLooking for link issues can be a really time consuming and labor intensive problem. Thanks to Majestic, and their killer proprietary link metrics, it can be much easier to get a quick view into potential link issues.

A client recently reached out and let us know that they thought they were having some issues with the recent Penguin roll out.This client has a very large site and have had some link issues in the past, so it’s definitely something that warranted investigation.

I wanted to get a quick directional check on the pages in their “money” directory to see if there was a potential problem.

 

 

How to Do A Toxic Link Analysis

  1. Enter the site/URL/directory you want to look at into Majestic Site Explorer. In this case, I wanted to look at all the pages in a specific directory, so I entered the top level page of the directory and selected “Path (URL*)”Get your data in Majestic
  2. Go to the “Pages” report and export the data
    Get the link data you want out of Majestic
  3. Open the export up in Excel and set a filter on “ReferringExtDomains” to show results > 10
    Referring Domains Filter
  4. Set a filter on “TrustFlow” to show all results < 10
    Trust Flow Filter

The resulting list of URLs you have are now highly likely to contain link spam. Here is just a single example the referring domains to a page that matched the above criteria:

Toxic Links!

There is lots of stuff you can do with this. You can go get all the referring domains or external backlinks to these URLs and then check them against your disavow file, if you have one. Domains that aren’t in the file can be added and submitted. You can kill the URL and create a new one etc. The world is your oyster.

Now whether you want to disavow the links or not really depends on if you believe Google that they are only devaluing the links in the newest version of Penguin (spoilers, I’m not willing to believe them without actual evidence).

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2 Response Comments

  • Robert  September 30, 2016 at 7:33 pm

    Majestic is one of the tools I have used and have found it to be great is there any other tools you suggest

    • Dan Leibson  October 1, 2016 at 9:32 am

      I really dig AHREFs as well. They are going to be participating in the 2017 Local SEO Ranking Factors, so I’ll be reporting back on their link metrics in 2017 🙂