Spam score что это

Spam score что это

This does not mean that your site is definitely spammy. The percentage represents a wide variety of potential signals ranging from content concerns to low authority metrics.

Since this is based on correlation with penalization rather than causation, the solution isn’t necessarily to change these factors on your site. If you have not had any penalties you shouldn’t be concerned about a Low or Medium score. It is best to use this percentage figure to judge the quality of inbound links to your site, giving you a signal to help you determine which of those links needs some further investigation and, perhaps, even removal.

Another site’s Spam Score

Again, this doesn’t mean that these sites are spammy. This percentage represents a wide variety of potential signals ranging from content concerns to low authority metrics.

Since this is just based on correlation with penalization, rather than causation, the solution isn’t necessarily to disregard sites or disavow links with higher Spam Scores. Instead, we’d recommend using it as a guide for kick starting investigations. Be sure to check out a site’s content and its relevance in linking back to you before disregarding or disavowing.

Export Your Data

You can export your data to CSV using the button on the right. Once your report is ready, you can download it from the Export Notifications flag on the top right.

Please note: The number of rows you’re able to export from Link Explorer is dependent on your subscription level.

Spam Score Signals

We utilized machine learning and a massive set of training data, consisting of known penalized and banned domains, to identify these key signals that are correlated with sites that have been penalized or banned.

We have listed these numerically, but this number has no bearing on the importance of each signal.

Here’s a rundown of the 27 signals we use:

1. Low number of pages found Our crawlers discovered only a small number of pages on this domain. This is not an inherent problem, but many spam sites have small numbers of pages, hence the correlation.

2. TLD correlated with spam domains Certain top level domains (e.g. .download .stream .win .biz)are more commonly associated with spammy sites.

3. Domain name length The length of the subdomain and root domain is similar to those used by spam sites.

4. Domain name contains numerals Numeric characters being included in the domain name is often associated with spam sites.

5. Google Font API Present Domains which do not use special fonts (e.g. Google Font API) are often more likely to be spam sites. Lacking this special font feature was common among spam sites we found.

6. Google Tag Manager Google Tag Manager is almost never present on spam sites.

7. Doubleclick Present The Doubleclick ad tag is almost never present on spam sites.

8. Phone Number Present Spam sites rarely have real phone numbers present on their pages.

9. Links to LinkedIn Almost no spam sites have an associated LinkedIn page, hence lacking this feature is correlated with spam.

10. Email Address Present Email addresses are almost never present on spam sites.

11. Defaults to HTTPS Few spam sites invest in SSL certificates; HTTPS is often a good trust signal.

12. Use of Meta Keywords Pages that use the meta keywords tag are more likely to be spam than those that don’t.

13. Visit Rank Websites with very few visits in clickstream panels were more often spam than those with high numbers of visits.

14. Rel Canonical Utilizing a non-local rel=canonical tag is often associated with spam.

15. Length of Title Element Pages with very long or very short titles are correlated with spam sites.

16. Length of Meta Description Pages with very long or very short meta description tags are correlated with spam sites.

17. Length of Meta Keywords Pages with very long meta keywords tags are often found on spam sites.

18. Browser Icon Spam sites rarely use a favicon; non-spam sites often do.

19. Facebook Pixel The Facebook tracking pixel is almost never present on spam sites.

20. Number of External Outlinks Spam sites are more likely to have abnormally high or low external outlinks.

21. Number of Domains Linked-To Spam sites are more likely to have abnormally high or low unique domains to which they link.

22. Ratio of External Links to Content Spam sites are more likely to have abnormal ratios of links to content.

23. Vowels/Consonants in Domain Name Spam sites often have many sequential vowels or consonants in their domain name.

24. Hyphens in Domain Name Spam sites are more likely to use multiple hyphens in their domain name.

25. URL Length Spam pages often have abnormally short or long URL path lengths.

26. Presence of Poison Words Spam sites often employ specific words that are associated with webspam topics like pharmaceuticals, adult content, gaming, and others.

27. Uses High CPC Anchor Text Spam sites often employ specific words in the anchor text of outlinks that are associated with webspam topics like pharmaceuticals, adult content, gaming, and others.

The Complete Guide to Spam Score (Plus 3 Valuable Ways to Use It)

Sure, one spam backlink by itself will do little harm.

But once multiple spam backlinks spread to your site, the results can be disastrous for your rankings.

In fact, spam links are one of the greatest contributors to losses in rankings, penalization and deindexing by Google.

Thankfully, there exists a scoring metric that will help keep backlink spam at bay.

It’s called Spam Score.

And in today’s post, I’ll give you everything you need to know about what Spam Score is, how it works, and how to use it to make sure spam isn’t ruining your SEO efforts.

The Complete Guide to Spam Score (Plus 3 Valuable Ways to Use It)

Spam Score is a rating system released by Moz in 2015 that predicts the possibility of subdomain spam on a website.

It consists of 17 spam “flags,” and each flag corresponds to a specific spam indicator as defined by Moz’s research team.

These flags help you determine whether a subdomain of a backlink pointing to your site is spammy (a.k.a. unnatural) or not.

Don’t worry if this all seems a bit confusing at the moment.

We’ll go more in-depth on each spam flag a little later on in this post.

Why Is Spam Score Important for SEO?

This is a metric you need to be paying attention to.

Because it gives you two valuable SEO-related pieces of information:

1. The spam possibility of your subdomain(s)

2. The spam possibility of your backlinks’ subdomains

Both of these pieces of info are crucial to creating pages and generating backlinks that will propel you to the top of search engines.

But that’s not all Spam Score does.

It also gives you the framework for determining the spamminess of individual pages and ultimately helps ensure your site isn’t penalized by search engines due to spam.

How Does Spam Score Work?

It’s actually pretty simple and straightforward:

Spam Score uses Moz’s own Moz Index to find and analyze subdomains for 17 distinct spam flags.

For each spam flag it finds, a number is added to the subdomain’s Spam Score.

The final Spam Score is then compiled by adding together all of the individual spam flags of a given subdomain, for a total of 0-17.

The higher the score, the more likely it’s spam.

But not always.

(I’ll tell you why in the next section.)

A Few Key Facts About Spam Score

Spam Score Is Accumulative in Its Relation to Spam Likelihood

Here’s something you may not know:

Almost all sites on the internet have at least one spam flag.

But that doesn’t guarantee that Google will view them as spam.

See, Spam Score is accumulative.

What I mean by this is that the more spam flags a subdomain has, the higher the likelihood it’ll be seen as spam in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

The graphic below from Moz gives you a side-by-side comparison of the number of spam flags a subdomain has to the probability of it being considered spam:

As you can see above, the probability of a subdomain being spam is represented by three colors: Green, Yellow and Red.

• Green = Low risk of spam
• Yellow = Medium risk of spam
• Red = High risk of spam

Also, it’s obvious that the higher the number of spam flags a subdomain has, the higher the probability of it being spam (with 14-17 spam flags being a 100% probability).

Spam Score Focuses Solely on Subdomains

Spam Score only gives you the probability of spam for subdomains.

Remember, a subdomain is a third-level domain in the hierarchical level of a site.

Take Monitor Backlinks for example:

1. Its top-level domain (or first-level domain) is “com.”

2. Its root domain (or second-level domain) is “monitorbacklinks.”

3. Its subdomains (or third-level domains) are “www” and “blog.”

With that in mind, Monitor Backlinks will have two separate Spam Scores. One for “www.monitorbacklinks.com” and one for “monitorbacklinks.com/blog.”

Since Spam Score only focuses on subdomains, this means that you won’t be able to see a Spam Score for root domains and individual pages.

Read that last line again because it’s super important.

It means two things:

1. A page with a subdomain with medium risk (yellow) may not be spam.

2. A subdomain with low risk (green) could still have individual pages that are spam.

So what does this mean for you?

It means that you should always do your own due diligence on the subdomain and individual pages of a site before you decide that it’s spam.

Spam Score Is Not the End-All, Be-All for Determining What Are Spam Links

Spam Score alone does not guarantee that a link is spammy.

There are other factors that will always come into play. Factors like a page’s number of external links, its top-level domain location and its other scores like MozTrust and MozRank, to name a few.

Here’s what this all means:

It means that a subdomain with a Spam Score of 8 does not automatically make a site spammy.

Nor does a subdomain with a Spam Score of 2 guarantee that a backlink is not spam.

Once again, I can’t stress this enough:

Make sure you research both the site and the page before deciding whether to remove or disavow a backlink due to the possibility of it being spam.

Spam Score’s 17 Spam Flags

Now, let’s take a closer look at each of the 17 spam flags Spam Score uses to determine the possibility of a subdomain being spam.

They fall into two main categories (as used by Moz) and contain (in no particular order):

Link Flags

1. Low MozTrust to MozRank Score

MozTrust and MozRank are two additional metrics used by Moz to determine the trustworthiness and popularity (respectively) of a site.

If a site has a significantly lower MozTrust score compared to its MozRank score, then there’s a higher likelihood that it’s spam.

2. Large Site with Few Links

This essentially means that the site has a large number of pages with very few links pointing to it.

Sites like this have a higher tendency to be spam as it’s a tell-tale sign that the site doesn’t contain quality and valuable content (i.e. content not worth linking to).

3. Site Link Diversity Is Low

This flag includes sites where the majority of the links to it are from a handful of domains.

For instance, let’s say a site has 100 links pointing to it. But those 100 links come from only five domains. That site has low link diversity and is most likely spam.

4. Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Subdomains

These are sites with a high number of followed links compared to nofollowed links.

This flag typically indicates that a site isn’t earning links naturally and is instead using paid link platforms to generate followed backlinks to their site, thus indicating spam.

(This also proves that you should never remove or disavow nofollowed links from your backlink portfolio simply because they’re nofollow.)

5. Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Domains

This is the same as number 4 above. Only, now it pertains to root domains.

To help clarify, look at Monitor Backlinks’ own site:

• monitorbacklinks.com would be the root domain of the site

• monitorbacklinks.com/blog would be a subdomain of the site

6. Small Proportion of Branded Links (Anchor Text)

Branded links are links that contain branded keywords (e.g. “Monitor Backlinks” or “Backlinko”).

Sites with organically occurring link portfolios tend to have a significantly higher number of links with branded anchor text.

So if a site has the opposite (a higher number of non-branded anchor text links), it’s a strong indicator that the site is spam.

On-Page Flags

7. Thin Content

Thin content is content that adds little to no value to visitors.

“Some of the pages that lie into this classification are pages with duplicate content, automatically generated content, affiliate and scraped content, and doorway pages can be classified as thin content by Google.”

8. Site Mark-up Is Abnormally Small

Site mark-up includes elements like Schema, CSS and Javascript, and is used to enhance the user experience for site visitors.

Sites with very little site mark-up (think a very basic HTML-heavy webpage with very little formatting, graphical elements and poor structure) are usually a large indicator of spam.

9. Large Number of External Links

These are sites that contain an abnormally large amount of external links (typically with few internal links).

A good example of these types of sites is low-quality blog directories. But they can extend to any type of site.

In Google’s eyes, sites with a large number of external links are considered spam.

10. Low Number of Internal Links

This spam flag often coincides with a larger number of external links.

A standard characteristic of a high-quality site is one with a healthy number of internal links pointing to its own pages.

Sites that lack this characteristic have a high likelihood of being spam.

11. Anchor Text-Heavy Page

Sites with an abnormally large proportion of anchor text-heavy pages compared to in-depth, quality content are a strong indicator of spam.

Again, low-quality blog directories is a good example of this type of spam.

12. External Links in Navigation

These are sites that have a significant number of external links placed within their site’s navigation structure (think sidebars and footers).

Sites that incorporate this practice are almost always spam.

13. No Contact Info

Reputable sites will have the means to contact them on their webpage.

This is typically a page dedicated to contact info or, at the very least, a section in the site’s footer or sidebar displaying contact information.

Sites that have no form of contact are considered spammy in Google’s eyes.

14. Low Number of Pages Found

Simply put, a site with a very low number of pages is generally considered spam.

If you’re old enough to remember, “Google Sniper” sites were a prime example of this type of spam website.

That being said, don’t think that a site needs to have hundreds of pages in order for it not to be viewed as spam. After all, Brian Dean’s Backlinko.com has a lower number of pages, but it’s far from being considered spam by Google.

15. TLD Correlated with Spam Domains

These are sites that originate from top-level domains (TLDs) that have a reputation of producing spam websites.

Sites originate from the TLD “.loan” are an example of this type of practice.

(I’ll go into a bit more detail on spammy TLDs later on in this post.)

16. Domain Name Length

Sites with long domain names are historically indicative of being spam.

For example, a site with a domain name like “buycheapconcerttickets.buyconcerttickets.com” would be a glaring attempt at keyword stuffing (an extremely spammy practice).

17. Domain Name Contains Numerals

Domain names that also contain numerals are a clear indicator of spammy websites.

So a website with the domain name “cheapconcerttickets4you.com” could be seen as spammy in Google’s eyes.

3 Valuable Ways to Use Spam Score

It should come as no surprise that you can use Monitor Backlinks to put Spam Score to work for your website.

Monitor Backlinks includes Spam Score as one of its metrics in determining the overall viability of a backlink.

And there are three valuable ways in which you can use it:

1. To check the spamminess of your own subdomain

2. To check the spamminess of your site’s backlinks

3. To draft out a disavow file

If you don’t have a Monitor Backlinks account and still want to follow along, you can grab a free trial to access all these features and more!

1. Check the Spamminess of Your Own Subdomain

When you log in to Monitor Backlinks, you’ll see your subdomain’s Spam Score on your main dashboard:

This score will tell you how many spam flags your own subdomain has according to the Moz Index.

What you see above reflects what I stated earlier:

Almost every subdomain will have at least one spam flag.

This is an excellent Spam Score.

But what should you do if your subdomain is in the Yellow (5-7) or Red (8-17)?

If that happens, it’s time to do a thorough evaluation of your site, asking questions based on the 17 spam flags and answering them accordingly.

• How many external links are in my site’s navigation?

• Is my site’s link diversity high enough?

• Is my content too thin?

• Do I have enough internal links in my content?

For well-established sites, certain spam flags simply cannot be changed—like domain name length and numerals in your domain.

Let’s say you eliminate all of the other spam flags from your subdomain. That leaves you with a Spam Score of 2. A terrific score!

2. Check the Spamminess of Your Site’s Backlinks

One of the most popular ways to use Spam Score together with Monitor Backlinks is to check the spamminess of backlinks pointing back to your site.

You do this by accessing the Your Links module in Monitor Backlinks:

This shows you all kinds of helpful info about each of the backlinks pointing back to your site. But, for now, we’re going to focus solely on the Spam Score column:

This column will tell you the Spam Score of each of your site’s backlinks—color-coded to match Moz’s color coding of Green, Yellow and Red.

There are two ways you can maximize the effectiveness of this info when mining for potential spam backlinks:

A. Sort the column by Spam Score

You can click the “Spam” title over the column to sort the links by Spam Score in descending order:

This will order the list of backlinks by “most spammy” in descending order.

B. Filter the backlinks to show a specific Spam Score range

Monitor Backlinks also has a “Filter” function that lets you filter out backlinks based on specified criteria.

For the purpose of Spam Score, what you’ll do is open the “Filter” options on the right of the page:

Then, scroll down the list of filters and click on “Spam Score:”

This will display a slider bar of Spam Score values to filter out your results.

For instance, let’s say we only want to see Red-labeled Spam Scores. What you’d do is move the slider bar from the left to the number “8:”

Monitor Backlinks will then automatically generate a new report that shows all of the backlinks with a Red Spam Score (8-17):

One more example:

Let’s say you now want to see all of the backlinks that do not have a Red Spam Score.

For that, you’d simply move the slider bar on the right to the number “7:”

Let Monitor Backlinks do its thing …

… and voilà! All backlinks with a Green or Yellow Spam Score are instantly displayed:

If you want to take things a step further and show only follow links, you simply click the button that says “Links that Google considers” at the top of your results …

… and you’ll see all of the follow links with Green and Yellow Spam Scores.

3. Draft a Disavow File

Finally, you can use Spam Score to help you create an initial draft report for researching backlinks that might need to be disavowed.

To do this, filter out all Yellow and Red Spam Score backlinks (move the slider bar to read “5 to 17”), then, click the “Links that Google considers” button to show only follow backlinks (since they’re the only ones you really need to worry about disavowing):

Next, and this is the most important part, make sure you investigate each link you’re thinking about disavowing before you commit.

Once you’ve finalized your links, your next step is to select them by clicking the checkboxes to the left of the Date column …

… click the “Disavow” button and select Disavow domains or URLs (again, if you’re unsure, reference the guide I linked to above):

Then, follow the rest of the steps to compile your disavow file and submit it to Google using their Disavow Tool.

What Else to Consider

Now, it’s important to remember that Spam Score isn’t always enough to make a decision.

Sometimes it’s fairly easy to decide whether a backlink is spam or not based on the Spam Score alone.

But other times it can be a bit more difficult.

For instance, most higher Yellow Spam Scores (6-7) and lower Red Spam Scores (8-10) will need further research to make an informed decision on the spamminess of the link.

In those situations, you can use a combination of both the other columns in the Backlinks module and the webpage itself to come to a more solid conclusion.

Here are some key indicators to look for:

Low MozRank and MozTrust Scores

Both MozRank and MozTrust scores can give you further insight into the potential spamminess of a backlink.

MozRank and MozTrust use a scoring scale of between 1 and 10.

The lower the score, the higher the likelihood that it’s spam.

To find the MozRank of a backlink, simply look at the corresponding columns within Monitor Backlinks’ Your Links module:

To find its MozTrust, you can try a free tool like Bulk Web Tools’ MozTrust Checker.

Just type in the URL you want to check along with the CAPTCHA and click “Submit:”

And the tool will return back relevant results:

Thin Content

Google doesn’t trust thin content (content that has no substance or adds no value).

Therefore, they’re more likely to view it as spam.

To decide whether a page has thin content, you really only need to ask yourself three questions while looking at the webpage:

1. Is the content 500 words or less?

2. Does the content add little to no value?

3. Is the content difficult to read (look for misspelled words, poor formatting, etc.)?

The more of these questions you can answer “yes” to, the higher the likelihood that it’s spam.

Large Number of External Links

Pages with a large number of external links (links pointing to a location outside of their domain) have a higher likelihood of being considered spam.

The lower the number of external links, the better.

But you should seriously consider removing or disavowing backlinks whose pages have more than 100 external links.

To see how many external links a page has, simply look at the “Ext” column in the Your Links module:

Exact-Match Anchor Text-Heavy Pages

These are pages that have a large quantity of exact-match anchor text in them.

In case you need a refresher:

Exact-match anchor text is anchor text that includes the exact keyword that the linked-to webpage is targeting.

For example, a link whose anchor text reads “large dog biscuits” that goes to a page that’s clearly targeting the keyword “large dog biscuits.”

(You can usually tell this right away when you visit the linked-to page.)

If it’s only a handful of anchor text entries that are exact-match, no big deal. But if an overwhelming majority of them are, then you should be concerned.

There are two ways you can check this:

To start with, use the “Anchor & Link To” column in the Your Links module to look at the anchor text used for your backlink:

Then, visit the page in question and inspect it for exact-match anchor text-heavy content.

TLDs Correlated with Spam Domains

Top-level domains (TLDs) can give you more info about the potential spamminess of a backlink than you think.

For one thing, if your site is based in the United States, then any top-level domain linking to your site that’s from a foreign TLD will be suspicious in Google’s eyes.

To check for foreign domain TLDs in the Your Links module, find the “TLD/IP” column and note the flag next to the TLD:

If it’s different than your home country’s flag, then it’s a foreign domain.

There are also other TLDs that are just spammier than others.

Spamhaus has a page that can help you determine whether a particular TLD is spammy or not.

To use it, click the drop-down box beside TLD Check and select the TLD you want to check:

It will then display a result (in the TLD Result box) that will tell you the percentage of bad domains stemming from that TLD, along with a Badness Index score (higher being worse):

They also include a list with the current top 10 bad TLDs.

As of the date this post was published, that list includes:

1. .gq
2. .cf
3. .ga
4. .ml
5. .loan
6. .tk
7. .work
8. .organic
9. .men
10. .date

Domain Name Length

The longer the domain name, the more it looks like spam in Google’s eyes.

A good max limit to feel confident that a backlink isn’t spammy is 25 characters.

Now, if a domain name has more characters than that, it doesn’t guarantee that it’s spammy. But it definitely increases the odds.

To find the length of a backlink’s domain name, simply look at the “Linking Page” column in the Your Links module:

(Hint: If you have to hover over the domain name to see its full length, that’s a tell-tale sign that it might just be spammy.)

Domain Name Contains Numerals

This is fairly straightforward.

If the domain name contains any numerals (e.g. “3”), then it increases the chances that it’s spam.

Like with checking domain name length, to see if a domain name has any numerals, look at the domain name located inside the “Linking Page” field inside the Your Links module:

Next Steps

If nothing else, I hope this post did two things for you:

1. Explained what Spam Score is, and

2. Showed you how to use it to further improve and advance your SEO strategy.

If it did those two things, then I’ll consider it a success.

But now I turn it over to you to put what you’ve learned into practice.

For starters, if you haven’t already, sign up for Monitor Backlinks (*cough* which offers a free no-risk trial period *cough*) and use it to do the following:

1. View your subdomain’s own Spam Score

2. Research and uncover backlinks that could be hurting your rankings

3. Remove and/or disavow those backlinks as needed

Then, every week, look over all new backlinks you’ve acquired and use the methods you learned above to keep your site spam-free!

What is Spam Score and What is it Used for?

There are a number of factors that can jeopardize your website and its search rankings. One of the major concerns every professional should pay attention to is whether or not their website is riddled with ‘spam backlinks’. This is something that Moz’s Spam Score can help with.

Simply having a lot of backlinks is not the way to succeed when building your SEO strategy. More does not mean better. Too many spam backlinks can have disappointing consequences to your site:

• Penalties by Google
• Losses in search engine rankings
• Getting deindexed (in severe cases)

To mitigate these outcomes, you need to be informed about how your site is viewed by search algorithms and take action to remedy any concerns. Fortunately, there is a helpful scoring metric known as a ‘Spam Score’.

This article will help you better understand this useful tool; how it assesses your site; how to use it to ensure the safety of your rankings and how you can combat a low Spam Score.

A Guide to Spam Score

Spam Score is a metric introduced by Moz in 2015. Developed by the company’s Director of Data Science, Dr. Matt Peters, it indicates how spammy a subdomain may be perceived by Google.

One very important distinction is that Spam Score is not used in Google’s algorithms – it’s a metric developed by Moz. The score itself is mainly useful as an added signal in making better informed SEO decisions.

Upon its first release, Spam Score analysed a website against 17 spam signalling factors, coined by Moz as ‘spam flags’. As the tool evolved, Moz incorporated more spam signalling factors ‘flags’. There are now 27 ‘spam flags’, which we will explain in detail later.

The aggregate of these flags is represented by a single score that indicates the likeliness of a site being penalized by Google. The more flags a site accumulates, the higher the Spam Score, and the stronger the prediction that it will be perceived as spammy by Google.

These flags allow you to break down areas of concern but are meant to be taken as a whole: a single flag is not usually enough for concern. In fact, it is quite common for sites to have at least one or two flags.

The Importance of Spam Score for SEO

Spam Score is crucial because it provides you with two important pieces of information:

• How spammy your own website’s subdomains can be perceived
• How spammy the subdomains of links pointing to your website can be perceived

In terms of your link profile, it shows that simply having a lot of thoughtless (spammy) backlinks can actually do more harm than good.

In addition to all these things, the Spam Score provides you with a solid framework to figure out the quality and spamminess of a single page. This way you can easily avoid being penalized by Google.

Learning the Mechanics: How Does it Work?

Overall, understanding the mechanics behind Spam Score is pretty straightforward.

Spam Score itself only operates on a subdomain level rather than for full pages or root domains. The reason for this, according to Moz, is that most spam links seem to be associated with the subdomain level.

What this means is, even if someone does have a somewhat high Spam Score, it is only applicable to their subdomains. It does not mean their entire website is spammy.

Spam Score is only accessible through Moz’s Link Explorer

As to how it works, each subdomain has a Spam Score and a number is added for every spam flag it finds.

These individual spam flags are then combined to output an ultimate Spam Score, which starts from 0 and ends at 17. Generally, the lower the Spam Score, the better. However, this is not always the case as we will see.

A Few Interesting Points about Spam Score

Surprisingly, every single website on the Internet has at least one spam flag, so there is no need to panic if your site has a few.

Having one flag doesn’t mean that search engines will automatically consider your site as spam (otherwise every page on the internet would be labeled as spam). It’s also important to note that this score is relevant to subdomains only – you should not freak out if you see a Spam Score from the get-go.

Considering that the Spam Score is cumulative, a website only begins to raise problematic signals when their spam flag count increases. In other words, the more spam flags a subdomain has, the higher the possibility it will be considered as spam.

More than 14 flags gives a 100% probability that a site would be considered as spam by Google

The table above is from Moz, where they pulled data from November 2014 for approximately 500,000 subdomains. As Moz says, the table shows “the relationship between the number of flags and percent of sites with those flags that we found Google had penalized or banned.”

This is where we see how clever the tool is. Moz has done the groundwork, understanding and correlating different factors with evidence from Google’s own rankings.

Considerations When Looking at Spam Score

Since Spam Score only considers subdomains within pages analysed, you may be asking yourself – what exactly is a subdomain?

The image below can help you get a better idea of the three different types of domains:

A URL that has all three domain types. Spam Score assesses the subdomain level of a site.

Since Spam Scores ultimately operate at the subdomain level, you should be aware that a page with a high-risk subdomain does not necessarily mean it is completely spam. In the same regard, a subdomain with low risk can also have several spammy pages.

It’s important to check both the subdomains and the individual pages before jumping to conclusions from a single score.

If your subdomain has a Spam Score of 8, it doesn’t guarantee that the site is real spam, while having a Spam Score of 2 doesn’t necessarily mean that the site is a really good one either.

Spam Score is Good, but it’s Not Everything

While Spam Score is a great metric to measure whether a link is spammy or not, it doesn’t provide a complete picture. It’s worth considering:

• The number of external links from the page that links to yours
• The top-level domain of the website that links to yours
• Other scores like MozTrust, MozRank, etc.

It is important to note that none of the metrics from Moz are used in Google’s algorithm (including Spam Score). Moz has tried to intimate what spam signals Google’s secret sauce algorithm may be looking for. For SEO, it serves as an important metric that can help you make better-informed decisions.

The Signals of Spam Score

When Moz first created the Spam Score metric, it began using an aggregate of 17 ‘spam flags’ to indicate whether a site was spammy. Over the years, using machine learning and big data sets of penalized/banned domains, they now rely on a total of 27 different factors, which they now refer to as Spam Score Signals.

Low MozTrust to MozRank Score
MozTrust and MozRank scores are two of the most important metrics used by Moz to determine the trustworthiness of a website. If a website has a lower MozTrust score in comparison to its MozRank score, there is a high chance of it being spammy. They use a scoring scale between 1 and 10, with a higher score indicating a better chance the site is trustworthy. It is important to check these scores with Moz’s Link Explorer.

A site without an SSL certificate will warn visitors in their browser

1. Too many meta keywords
   Web pages that possess too many meta keyword tags tend to be tied closer to spam than those that do not, so a site that possesses a lot of them could be marked as spammy.

A site favicon can be found in the browser tab and is usually similarly branded

How to Use the Spam Score?

Now that you’ve come this far and are well aware of what a Spam Score is, the question remains: what do you do with this score?

Spammy subdomain

With Spam Score, you can determine whether your subdomain is spammy or not, and if it is, you should immediately take action to identify and rectify any spam signals. Having a spammy subdomain may deter your site from being optimally ranked on search engines.

Quality backlinks

You can also determine whether the backlinks pointing to your website are of high quality or not. Amateurs in SEO immediately presume that having more backlinks is better, but as the old adage goes ‘quality beats quantity.’ You want to ensure that sites linking to yours are authority pages that search engines deem as trustworthy.

Using a Disavow Tool

Sometimes, you may have no control over whether a spammy site backlinks to you. In some circumstances, this can negatively impact your rankings. For those who do not have control over spammy links, you can use Google’s Disavow Tool.

The tool tells Google to disregard certain links as specified by you, which can help prevent your site from being penalized.

Google’s Disavow tool’s disclaimer

While this is a very useful tool to improve your rankings, we do not recommend using it whenever and however you wish. Google itself suggests to only use the tool when your site has a lot of low-quality backlinks and you are very certain that they are causing problems. We recommend reading this article from Neil Patel if you decide to disavow any links. Before you decide to use Google’s Disavow Tool, first try to remove the link yourself by sending an email to the source. This action should be done with care, as it can be seen as malicious and does not come with a good reputation, but there are always ways to go about it politely.

Detailed Considerations of a Spammy Site

Even if a Spam Score is great, it is not everything. There are a ton of other indicators to denote that a website is spammy. To ensure the utmost safety of your website, it is always better to go deeper into your research, and look at the following:

‘Thin’ Content

While it may be difficult to determine the exact quality of content, and there are no specific tools that indicate this, it is best practice to create content that has depth.

In general, high quality content is longer – greater than 1500 words – and contain a lot of images, while also being written in a concise, easily-readable way. Using a lot of visual elements like images, infographics, videos, etc. can help beef up your content, making it more valuable.

Google values high-quality content and detests any content that does not contain any depth. Not only do they not create any value for users, it prevents engagement. Considering Google tries to provide searchers with the best results, it makes sense that it prioritizes pages with in-depth content.

Excessive External Links

One way that many websites look to get backlinks is by listing themselves on directories. While there are a handful of trustworthy directories out there, many of them are flooded with an abundance of external links that search engines likely deem as not valuable. This is not a good sign.

Websites like Wikipedia, however, are excluded from pages that consist of a lot of external links but signal danger, as every single link on Wikipedia has its own unique purpose. As a fully informational site with millions of well curated pages, external links on Wikipedia provide real value to readers.

Generally speaking, besides informational sites and publications that hold some weight to them, it’s recommended to stay away from overloaded sites with more than 100 external links per page.

Pages Loaded with Exact-Match Keywords

There was a time when people over-optimized their pages with exact-match keyword and received results immediately. However, those days are long gone. These days, Google’s algorithms will carefully examine whether the content is relevant to the keywords used, and determines if it is beneficial to the reader.

Avoid Specific TLDs

While we did mention that subdomains are where Spam Scores are taken into consideration, looking at top-level domains can help to see whether your website may be seen as potential spam.

Any website that is based in the USA that has a foreign TLD runs the risk of being suspicious to search engines. With so many options for domain names these days, it might seem interesting to choose a TLD that is unique and different from the typical .com or .net. However, we recommend keeping it to the standard, because that is what works.

The following TLD’s are risky to use:

• .date
• .men
• .organic
• .work
• .tk
• .loan
• .ml
• .ga
• .cf
• .gq

Conclusion

Spam Score is a simple and straightforward concept, but one that a lot of professionals may look past in their SEO strategy. This is unfortunate, as even the slightest mishap can cause problems in your overall ranking. With the knowledge from this article, we hope you will be able to better make use of Spam Scores and improve your overall SEO strategy.

If you require advice on lowering the Spam Score of your website or inbound links, please contact us to schedule a free consultation.

Aaron Chi

Aaron Chi is a digital marketer that has a deep passion for human behavior. As a lover of words and focus in content marketing, he dives deep into breaking down the science behind SEO and relating that to data analytics, and eventually artificial intelligence.