Spam Score
-
My site has a spam score of 2/17. How bad is this?
Domain authority is 23 and page authority is 32. The domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com.
In total, according to MOZ, there are 38 inbound links. Spam scores for the inbound links are as follows:
1 (8)
1 (6)
2 (5)
2 (4)
3 (3)
16 (2)
4 (1)
8 (0)The number in the parentheses represents spam score.
Does it make sense to get some of these links removed? Is it necessary for me to remove links from all sites with a spam score of 5,6,7,8?
If we remove these lower quality links will Domain Authority and Page Authority improve?
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi Kingalan - first off, I'd recommend checking out http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday which will give you a pretty good overview of what Spam Score is and how it works.
I wouldn't worry about firing two flags - Moz triggers a few, and many good sites do as well. If they're things you want to fix anyway, go for it, but Spam Score flags aren't about saying "this is necessarily bad" or "this definitely needs fixing." It's merely identifying features that, when added together, show correlations with sites we saw Google penalize/ban.
As far as your links go - that distribution seems fine to me, too. If you want, you could look at the highest flag count links and if you believe they're problematic after manually reviewing, go ahead and give them the boot (via disavow or getting the site to remove them). The flag count is merely to help you order your manual review - it should never replace the process of actually looking at those links and determining which should be kept/removed.
-
2/17 isn't bad I think that's less than a 5 percent chance of having any Google problems. What those flags are is more important. Rand has said a few times that the flags are not suggestions to fix something. They are simply correlations. Many of the flags can not be avoided for some sites. I wouldn't worry about a 2/17 score. Look at what the flags are and if they are things you can change and feel you should then do it.
As far as removing links goes, these flags can be a good indicator for further investigation in my opinion. I personally am going to investigate sites that have 5 or more but the final decision will be based on my normal link evaluations. Does the link link with spammy sites, does it hold any relevance to my site, does it drive desired traffic to my site, does it help or hurt my brand, does it exist only to create links, etc. etc. I would not advise saying well any links that have over 5 or 8 flags I am now going to get rid of or disavow. Use it as an indicator and then do good research on the suspect sites.
I can't speak to PA and DA impact as I am not sure if spam score is being included into those at this time. My understanding is that they are not. If they are really poor links then get rid of them regardless of PA and DA. Where you have a low amount of links then I would say yes a single poor link could have a greater impact on your ranking than it would on a site with thousands of links. That's all just my 2 cents though.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Got Spam Score on New Sites without Building Backlinks
Hey MOZ Team, I hope you guys are fine. Actually today I'm reviewing my client site and suddenly saw that their spam score is 39. They don't have too many backlinks. They have few of them and they're not Sammy. Can you Guide me a little bit why these types of things happens. Because the site is almost new. Here's the website link: https://pmpteacher.com/
Moz Pro | | koipl0 -
Big drop in Domain Authority score
Hi I am managing a website, that in May was indexed at 67 i DA - then we installed SSL and we dropped to 26 and we're still there - I do not now, how I can change my site, so that I can regain some of the DA. It is a wordpress site and we used a free SSL certificate and I have detected no problem with the 301 redirects. Do you have any insights or tips?
Moz Pro | | Stine-Dahl0 -
Spam links with high DA
I'm running through the spam analysis and noticed a few links that are considered to be 9+ on the spam score (high spam level), but some of them have DA of 60 -75. How can this be possible? When I view the sites they appear to be be pretty low quality. If i'm considering disavowing a site should I focus on spam score or DA? A DA of 75 is a pretty reputable standing.
Moz Pro | | STP_SEO0 -
Spam and Irrelavent Backlinks
Hey! We have a site that is fairly well ranking in a niche of the medical profession. It has a good link profile with great .gov links etc. OSE doesn't show most of the links, however all the ones it does show are all good. We noticed an across the board drop in rankings recently, and checked on AHREFS. What we found, was hundreds of backlinks to a variety of pages on the site from a wide range of spam/porn/Russian/irrelevant sites. Even stranger is that some of the links have anchor text like "continue shopping" but they link to a page on our site about a type of limb fracture. Has anyone come across this before? How is this possible? Thanks
Moz Pro | | wearehappymedia0 -
Moz Spam Analysis vs. GWMT Links to Your Site
Hi Moz Community, I have been conducting some link auditing and started comparing the Moz Spam Analysis tool with the links provided in Google WMT. It appears that the Moz Spam Analysis tools shows an aggregate of links that Moz may or may not consider spam, however when you download and look at Google's "Links to Your Site" list it provides every link iteration known to man that's pointing to the target website - without providing any hints as to whether or not a link may be considered spam by Google. The biggest concern I have here is that Google is picking up a lot of links, which I consider spam, that do not appear in the Moz Spam Analysis results. I guess the question(s) I have are: Does it make sense to compare these two data sets? Has anyone else tried this comparison and how did you use the information to make positive changes? Any recommendations when it comes to determining if an external link is spam/hurting/helping a website? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | GoogleDowner0 -
What makes up the Influence score in Followerwonk
New Year, new SEO and social media resolutions... Trying to read up on some to-dos and not to-dos I stumbled across Followerwonk, which I totally love. I do however wonder how the Influence score is calculated. Anyone know?
Moz Pro | | TobiiTech0 -
Twitter Page Authority Score?
I've been doing some competitive research in Open Site Explorer and many of our competitors have Twitter accounts very similar to ours. Their Twitter pages are usually one of the pages with linking to their website with the most Page Authority. The incoming links from Twitter are a "no follow" as you would guess. This has been the case for a large number of well ranking sites I have looked at. www.dremed.com also has a Twitter account at: https://twitter.com/#!/DREmed . However, Open Site Explorer does not list the Twitter link as an incoming link at all ( or if it does it has no Page Authority ). The Twitter account page seems very similar in nature to other competing Twitter pages. I'm not sure why it does not ALSO pull a high Page Authority score??? Do you know why this might be? Best, Justin
Moz Pro | | justinjeffries0