Spam score 9/17 and redirect Question

[onlinegusto]

I sat on a .com domain,  which name become increasing popular  (xyzselfie) for 2 years ... 4 months ago I hired a VA to do a task. A miscommunication made this person submit my domain to the spammiest directories the internet has to offer. Also because of the domain name and the .com a lot of asian or weird sites/things posted links to my site.

I have worked on my site for the last 4 months trying to lower my spam score from a 9. I have:
-Disavowed all the sites that pointed to my site.
-Made more internal links
-Tried to make my content thicker 
-Included my email and social profiles to the site

In the process my competitors site with exact domain name but .net and more authority came on auction, I bought it and I pointed it with a permanent redirect to my site (hoping my site would in time lose its spam score).

This site will generate and income by appearing in search and adsense ads.

After months of work I'm at a loss what to do.

Does the spam score generally take long to drop? Should i try and stop the permanent redirect and direct my .com to the .net domain? Are there experts who can lower my score? Should I look for non spammy directories in its niche and submit my site to them to increase link authority and nofollow links ?

Any feedback or insight would be highly appreciated.

fFtTOFk

[onlinegusto]

Wohoo, a response that really touches on everything.. I wish I could give you more thumbs up.

Thanks Matt. I did not mean to be so hard on Jordan or you but that never answered my question.

I don't have a manual penalty yet but I really dont want to be slapped with one, so I"ve been tip toeing and almost not trying to get noticed by Google. LOL. A 70% chance of getting a penalty can be really scary for someone who dropped a full-time job for a website.

Neil dropped a nice post about it yesterday http://www.quicksprout.com/2015/08/05/the-step-by-step-guide-to-fixing-any-google-penalty/. Ive read the links you sent me and will try concentrate on the broader picture.

Thanks Matt

[MattRoney]

Hi onlinegusto,

I endorsed Jordan's answer because I felt that it was a succinct answer to the question. I dounderstand how and why the response wasn't satisfying to you, though, so I'll attempt to address your question in its entirety.

**Does the Spam Score generally take long to drop? **That depends. As Jordan and I have both noted, Spam Score updates along with the rest of our link metrics with each new index. When your Spam Score updates will depending on when, and even if, the latest crawl indexed your site. I recommend reading this Help Hub page on Mozscape updates to get an understanding of how that works.

I also recommend reading Rand's post from the launch of Spam Score, which goes into those 17 factors. That could give you an idea of the sort of things that could be giving your site that score of 9/17, which in turn could give you an idea of what you'll need to do to bring it down.

**Should I try and stop the permanent redirect and direct my .com to the .net domain? **Hard to say. Though TLD is considered in Spam Score, it only considers TLDs highly associated with spam to be problematic. That's not the case for either .com or .net, so the simple fact of your TLD isn't a factor in your site's 9/17. If one or the other has a lower score, feel free to use that one, but be mindful of the other SEO issues that could arise.

Are there experts who can lower my score? Also hard to say. There certainly aren't any experts I'm aware of who focus specifically on lowering Spam Score. There are experts who focus on penalty recovery, but I see no indications that your site has been penalized. I can't speak for the entire community, as members contribute to these discussions on their own time and without compensation. There isn't any directory of community members and their specialties.

It's worth pointing out exactly what Spam Score measures. The 17 factors are correlations, not in and of themselves indicators of spam. I'll let Rand take it, from the blog post I linked:

The overall Spam Score is currently an aggregate of 17 different "flags." You can think of each flag a potential "warning sign" that signals that a site may be spammy. The overall likelihood of spam increases as a site accumulates more and more flags, so that the total number of flags is a strong predictor of spam. Accordingly, the flags are designed to be used together—no single flag, or even a few flags, is cause for concern (and indeed most sites will trigger at least a few flags).

To lower your score, the best thing you can do is focus on the particular flags that you'll find in the Open Site Explorer report. And, of course, to build high-quality links.

**Should I look for non spammy niche directories in its niche and submit my site to them to increase link authority and nofollow links? **I would never recommend any link directories as a means for building your link profile. They're very unlikely to help in that regard. They _may _help by driving a certain amount of traffic to your site, but that will do very little to help with Spam Score or authority.

So, to summarize:

1. Spam Score updates along with the Mozscape index, so it could take some time to see a change.

2. As—at least partially—a link metric, Spam Score can be improved by building a quality link profile. That could include disavowing your own spammy links, but please be careful if you decide to do so.

3. Making positive changes on your site will lower your Spam Score over time.

Please be empathetic to Jordan and me and understand why we both felt that his response provided an effective, boiled-down answer to your question. Good luck, though! I know how frustrating it is to see a metric like that with no apparent way to improve.

[onlinegusto]

Hey Jordan and even Matt,

Although I do appreciate the reply, I personally feel this does not add any value to my question. It just makes it appear that its answered when all you've done is fluff it up with an answer that any "general" SEO person would give.

You also answered a question I didn't even ask. Obiously I'm working on cultivating authoritative backlink profile and I only disavowed the ones with a high spam score and no relevance to my site. (but this has not worked, hence why I am here)

Let me ask the questions in more detail and hope they will get answered.

Does the spam score generally take long to drop? - I've been working for 4 months and seen no improvement, but funny enough even before these links were indexed my site had a 9 spam score and I had never touched it, it was parked at godaddy. Have you heard of this before.

Should i try and stop the permanent redirect and direct my .com to the .net domain? - Can I even do this.

Are there experts who can lower my score? I consider myself good at SEO, are there experts in the Moz community who consider this their speciality.

Should I look for non spammy niche directories in its niche and submit my site to them to increase link authority and nofollow links? My site is in the fitness niche, do relavent directories in this niche with low scores help or because they are probably follow links, detrimental to my site?

My response is maybe hostile but when I'm enquiring on an SEO specific website that im considering paying membership to. I may have well asked this on Quora, Warriorform or Yahoo answers.

Actual answers to my questions would have been apprecited, also, terrible grammar irks me.

Thanks

Does the spam score generally take long to drop? Should i try and stop the permanent redirect and direct my .com to the .net domain? Are there experts who can lower my score? Should I look for non spammy directories in its niche and submit my site to them to increase link authority and nofollow links ?

[JordanRailsback]

Hi there!
One thing to note is that our link index (including the Spam Score metric) is update on a roughly monthly basis. So, it can definitely take some time before your domain metrics are recalculated.

In general, the best advice for any link-related question is almost always to focus on cultivating healthy, relevant and authoritative backlinks to work on your site's backlink profile. Disavowing links can be a beneficial step, depending on the links, but it can also be dangerous to disavow all links to a domain.

If you're making positive changes on your site for the sake of your site and its content, then you'll see your Spam Score work its way down as a side-effect