Spam Score is like cancer to your website. It will not only impact your site’s ranking but may also result in the search engine penalty or deindexed of webpages.
It is very important to think about this score seriously otherwise it may cause major damage to your website in the future.
If your website is showing a high Spam Score or it got increased suddenly then you must read this article throughly.
In this article, I have tried to answer questions like
- What is Spam Score
- Why is my website’s spam score high
- What does spam Score too high mean
- How to reduce spam Score and
- Various metrics used in Spam Score calculation
I know, tons of blog posts are already written on this topic. But very few people know the real meaning of it.
If you are under impression that it is only caused by Spam Backlinks then you are wrong.
I have seen many websites having zero backlinks but still, their score is too high. This is because, besides backlinks, there are many other factors affecting it.
Don’t worry, I have discussed those factors latter in this article.
What is Spam Score
It is a metric developed by Moz in 2015. It represents the percentage of websites with similar features that got banned or penalized by Google.
Moz update this score once in every quarter that is at every 3 months.
If your score is somewhere between 0% to 30% then it is fine. Between 30% to 60% is on the borderline and above 60% is troublesome.
Always remember, It does not mean that your website is spammy and has lots of spam backlinks.
There can be other reasons too.
Disavowing bad backlinks will not help you here. Disavowing will only tell Google not considering those backlinks while ranking your content in the search results.
Still not convinced? I would request you to please check the below snapshot once.
Form the above snapshot you can clearly see the score of Moz website that is 3%.
Now, do you really think, moz is a spammy website?
I am sure your answer will be No. Right?
Then, Why does Moz’s website have a score of 3%?
This is because besides spammy backlinks this metric is also influenced by many other factors as well.
How to check Moz Spam Score
If are three ways to check spam score of your website.
- Moz pro account:- If you have access to the Moz pro account then you will find this option on the left side menu under the Links heading.
- Free Moz account:– Moz free account allow 10 FREE requests per day. In a free account, you will find this option on the left side menu under the Links Research heading.
- Free Online Checker tools: You can also use a free online tool to check the spam score of the given website. Such tools use API to pull score data directly from the Moz website.
Now, let us understand how this Moz metric works and what all are the factors considered while assessing the score of a website?
How Moz metric work
Moz data science team led by Dr. Matt Peters had identified around 27 potential factors (called Spam flags) that can predict that a site might be penalized or banned by Google.
Now, moz convert these spam flags into a score called as Spam Score.
But here one thing important to note is- Currently it only operates on subdomain only. Your sub domain only trigger this score.
This is because, according to moz, link spam is generally related to subdomain only. Hence, it was better to develop this metric at the subdomain level.
Moz’s Spam Score 27 Potential Factors
These 27 potential factors putting together build the metric of moz’s spam score.
Let’s have a quick view of those 27 factors below.
- Use of high CPC words in the anchor text.
- Length of the given URL. A Spammy URL is generally too short or long.
- Use of multiple hyphens in the domain name
- The low number of webpages
- Spam-related TLD domain. This is why I strongly do not recommend using free domain name.
- Length of the domain name
- Numeric content in the domain name
- Missing of Google Tag manager
- Missing of Google Font Manager
- Absence of DoubleClick ads
- Missing of mobile number from website
- Missing links to LinkedIn, a social networking site.
- The missing email address from the website
- Missing SSL certificate server website on HTTP only.
- Length of Title of the content
- Length of Meta Description
- Length of Meta Keywords
- Backlinks Profile
- The ratio of external link to content
- Number of domain linked to
- Use of poison words related to spam
- Utilizing a non-local rel=canonical tag
- Missing Favicon from a website
- Missing Facebook Favicon from a website
- Use of sequential vowels or consonants in the domain name
- Low traffic and
- Use of Meta Keywords.
Above all are the various factors that moz used while calculating the score of a website.
If you read carefully the above list then you will observe that these factors are very common and generally related to a website SEO. Right?
How to Reduce Spam Score
If you want to reduce spam score of your website on moz then I recommend checking above 27 factors on your site.
It is only after improving these 27 factors you can improve spam score on moz.
Next, disavowing backlinks in the webmaster account will not help here.
In case of spammy backlinks, you need to call all those website owners who link backed to your site. And, ask them to remove link from their websites.
I know it is a very tedious and time-consuming activity. But trust me this is the only way to improve your backlinks portfolio and this will only help you in reducing the spam score.
Over to You
Spam score necessarily doesn’t mean the website is spammy. But, it indicates that websites with similar features got banned or penalized by the Google.
Hence, the given website require more detailed investigation.
Next, if your site have high score then you can reduce the same trough optimizing above mentioned 27 factors.
For more information on this, you can refer to this article on Moz sharing frequently asked questions about Spam Score.
At last, if you have any query or help required related to the Spam score then feel free to contact us or leave your message below in the comment box. I will be really happy to help you.