Spam Score and You
-
Hey everybody!
Looking for a few opinions on this. I am working with a site that has some backlinks with extremely high spam scores, all the way up to 86%. I have ran these through screaming frog and A LOT of them are 404's, or even 301. So obviously if they are 404's then I don't need to worry about them as much. They will sort themselves out.
But what about all these other ones with a 25% and higher spam score? A lot of them also do not have SSL and are obv insecure. I would presume google doesn't like backlinks from sites that are not secure. Thoughts?
-
How the spam score works on blog type website? Some of my pages and blog post have hight spam score then main domain.
-
ty both!
-
I'm with Joe on the over 80% rule myself
-
Do you have a rule of thumb? Check anything over 50% and then disavow anything over 70% etc. Obv there are exceptions but just looking for some guidelines
-
Only very high spam scores should really worry you, and even then only as an indicator which compels you to check through some of them
"I have ran these through screaming frog and A LOT of them are 404's, or even 301. So obviously if they are 404's then I don't need to worry about them as much. They will sort themselves out." - mmmmm somewhat true, somewhat not true. Servers can actually serve different status codes, to requests from different IP ranges, geographic locations (or even to certain user-agents / web browsers). Might be safe to run those ones again if you are using Screaming Frog default user agent and try from 1-2 other residential IP addresses (just to be certain you aren't being fibbed to). Another thing, sometimes horrible scraper sites move the link they have to you, around an array of pages over time, so just because that one's gone it doesn't mean another hasn't popped up elsewhere on the site to replace it (some links are transient). Just remember that
Google would care more if you were linking out to insecure content (thereby spreading the insecure footprint of the web). Inbound links from insecure aren't always a big deal, but it can be a 'signal' of crappy, spammy sites. A lot of YMYL (Your Money Your Life, e.g: experimental untested medical procedures, illegal gambling sites) - are on HTTP rather than HTTPS, because they're mostly built by con-artists who love to cut corners. Links from sites like that aren't great
-
Hi there, personally I only ever worry about SPAM scores over 80%, I don't consider SSL as an issue; especially for older links.
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
-
Spam Score of 7??
Hi, I recently took on a client for local SEO and i started improving his on page optimization etc and now I'm continuing with link building. It's hard since it's a boring industry (medical waste disposal), but I have gotten some links. When I check up his link profile in OSE, it's still giving me a spam score of 7!!! and not showing the links I have acquired. I already removed the link it's showing up by contacting the website and it's not there anymore. The site is a very clean nice site, why am I getting such a high spam score? Thanks for your help! Rachel
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rachel_J0 -
Open Site Explorer - Spam analysis: need help with inbound links... from my site!
hallo, reading my spam analysis report from open explorer, I found somenthing I don't understand (please see attached image): The long list of links inside the red rectangle are inbound links with a spam score of 5 coming from my same site. How is that possible? Should I remove those links? Also , I see that many of those links are links present in the top navigation bar (about page, home page, service description etc.) or in the sidebar section of the website (categories, recent posts, recent comments). Should I treat them differently? Thank you for your time.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | micvitale0 -
Spam Score - how to fix No Contact Info and Low Number of Pages Found
Hi We recently change the layout of our website to a responsive theme in the hope of improve our rankings. We are getting less more traffic but less conversions to sales. Our Spam sore has these flagged No Contact Info - we have the phone number on top of every page and a contact us link at the bottom of every page - Is there something we are missing ? Low Number of Pages Found - we have over 3000 products each of which has a page, plus other info pages on our stite - Whay would this be flagged.RegardsAdrienne
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CostumeD0 -
Our website scores A but on google we are still on 7th page
Hi all, I have run on page keyword optimizations with exact terminology used to find our company service or our competition on google. We have ranked A, with almost all points complete. I did the same for our main competitor and they ranked F. Then i did page positioning on Google and they get on page 1 fifth line and we get page 7. We have plenty of unique content and extensive website.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EMGCSR
Could there be any other reason than reason for this other than backlinks? Many thanks for your help.0 -
Rankings dropped off a cliff. Webmaster tools message: No manual spam actions found. Now what?
A week ago my rankings for http://www.top-10-dating-reviews.com (some adult content) dropped and I'm now getting now impressions. I submitted a reconsideration request as I was sure I hadn't violated any rules and today the reply was that no manual spam actions were found. Te email goes onto say there are a variety of other things that could affect rankings such as site architecture, not being able to crawl and algo changes. As far as I'm aware all these issues are fine. I'm not aware of any algo updates last weekend. my question is what can I do now? I need to get my rankings back but there's nothing wrong with my site or practices.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamCUK0 -
Photo Gallery marked as spam???
Hi all, we recently launched some articles with photo galleries. Our CMS produces a single URL for each photo you click--> www.domain.com/article-url/photogallery/1, www.domain.com/article-url/photogallery/2 and so forth... We have 6-15 photos in our galleries. Each photo has a caption which contains 1-3 sentences. We do not advertise on our pages, so these gallery pages just contain of the top navigation, sidebar, footer, picture and the caption. My question: Google is indexing these URLs, do you think that they will be considered spammy, as there is almost no content on these pages? Should we noindex them? Or canonical them to the article URL? Or write more content to each photo and let them be indexed??? Thanx....
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accessKellyOCG0 -
**and spam**
Hi, The web-designer would like to make us use this CSS-class: or **, in order to keep all over the same size of the titles on a page. Is it a problem for the search engine (like spam)? I haven’t ever use this CSS-class and that’s why I can’t see if it is good or bad. Has someone already used it? Thank you in advance!**
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ISA-AU0 -
Pinging SE's - is this spam?
Hi, Just read on ViperChill that Matt Cutts told Glen (owner of ViperChill) that ping services can help your blog posts. Now lets say you have a list of 10 that you ping and you put an article up everyday, thats 300 pings a month, is that not spammy? Here is the link to the post: http://www.viperchill.com/future-of-blogging/ If you scroll down your see a screen print of Google search box, its the para above and below this screen print.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | activitysuper1