Moz is showing thousands of backlinks to my site that are not showing up on Google Search Console - which is good because those links were created by some spammer in Pakistan somewhere.

I haven't yet submitted a disavow report to Google of well over 10K links because the list keeps growing every day with new backlinks that have been rerouted to a 404 page.

I have asked Google to clarify and they put my question on their forum for an answer, which I'm still waiting for - so I thought I'd try my luck here.

My question...

If Moz does not match Google Search Console, and backlinks are important to results, how valid is the ranking that Moz creates to let me know how I'm doing in this competition and if I'm improving or not.

If the goal is to get Google to pay attention and I use Moz to help me figure out how to do this, how can I do that if the backlink information isn't the same - by literally over 10 000 backlinks created by some spammer doing odd things...

They've included the url from their deleted profile on my site with 100s of other urls, including Moz.com and are posting them everywhere with their preferred anchor text.

Moz ranking considers the thousands of spam backlinks I can't get rid of and Google ignores them or disavows them. So isn't the rankings, data, and graphs apples and bananas?

How can I know what my site's strength really is and if I'm improving or not if the data doesn't match?

Complete SEO Novice

Shannon Peel
Brand Storyteller
MarketAPeel

@BlueprintMarketing
Thank you for this... it is helpful.

I use the link list from Moz and others to help me find out which profiles and forum posts are spammers then I delete and 301 to a 404 page to ensure that URL is 404ed.

I get too many a day and it is a waste of my time.

@tyrerunner I have not found a solution. When I interviewed SEO specialists on my podcast, I asked them and they said Google would ignore them and not to worry - Which I can see when I look at the backlinks Google Search Console has.

The problem is all these SEO tools showing thousands of these backlinks and making it harder for me to use the tool efficiently.

I followed the backlinks and found I'm in good company in these lists of links, it's just too bad that the anchor text is wrong because some of those back links have a decent ranking.

I did go to some of the higher ranked sites and when appropriate, created my own content with links using the right anchor text in the hopes that the matching keywords would help make it clearer - but they have yet to show up on any of the SEO tools or Google.

I did have a few visits from Google looking for that service but I think they were from before I deleted the posts - so the keywords were there to match - I've since fixed that problem.

I deleted the posts on my site but the url doesn't disappear and the page it lands on was empty so I 301 the pages to a 404 telling visitors the site is about brand storytelling and linked to the different pages if they were interested. This 404 page was already developed for those times a page load messed up.

I asked Google - no one has answered me there.

I have offered to sell an ad page on my site to a company and 301 all the links to it. - Not sure if this is a good idea - but I'd like to benefit somehow

If you come up with a solution or a better way to deal with all this spam and still get good data out of Moz etc... please let me know.