Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How does spammy linked site have zero spam score?
-
I came across a law firm site with hundreds of horrible spam links to it. Of the 3330 links, all but 231 links have anchor text that has to do with "jordan 11s for sale".
I'm trying to see how useful the moz spam score is, but clearly it's not reliable if this site has a score of zero. Many of the obviously spammy sites linking to it also have low to zero spam scores, although there are plenty in the 5-10 range. (see attached image). I also noticed that many sites were legit sites, but if you look at the source code, there's tons of hidden spam links in the code (e.g., www.chickasawgardens.net)
Why would this site have a zero spam score? If you're curious, put it into open site explorer and have a look. It's a law firm based in Pennsylvania, most anchor text has to do with jordan sneakers and most links are foreign: penn-criminallawyers.com
Is the spam score too lenient? Is the moz tool unable to find spam links coming from legitimate sites with hidden spam links?
-
Hi there!
Don is absolutely right that spam score values varying by subdomain, as that's how we make distinctions for the metric.With that being said, spam score of a given subdomain is not particularly easily influenced by the types of sites that are linking to it. Most of the 17 possible spam flags (which can be viewed here: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis/flags?subdomain=www.penn-criminallawyers.com) are reflective of on-site factors within the subdomain itself. So, while I agree that spam score is not particularly well-adjusted to speak to the fact that http://www.penn-criminallawyers.com/ has some serious issues with their inbound links, it's worth noting that they didn't necessarily have to have cultivated all of those backlinks for themselves. I'm certainly not trying to go down the rabbit hole of spam conspiracy theories, but simply accounting for the fact that anyone can create a link to any site (unless disavows are involved), and it could be rash to judge a subdomain's "spammyness" based purely on their inbound external link profile.
Spam score is based on these 17 flags based on correlation (not causation) research that was done by Moz's data scientists, and it also makes the acknowledgement that there will be penalized sites with low spam , as well as non-penalized sites with a high spam score. For more context on that, I'd highly recommend that anyone looking into using spam score watch this explanation from Rand on the topic: https://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday
To clarify, am I advocating that http://www.penn-criminallawyers.com/ is not a spammy site based on what spam score says? Nope. I'm not even speaking to that topic at all. For all I know, it certainly could be (and maybe I'm even inclined to think it is).
Am I saying that spam score is a value you should take at face value without doing any digging into the specific subdomains, themselves? Certainly not. I would stress doing serious research any time you're looking into spam, credibility or disavowing; it's simply there to serve as a potential source of guiding information.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi,
You may also want to check the domain variations. http://penn-criminallawyers.com/ and http://www.penn-criminallawyers.com/
If you look at the www version you will see a spam score of 4/10. You'll need to make sure you set the filter to "this root domain"
It could be that at some point the website used the www but have since switched to no www. There are some inconsistency like that with the tool. Technically "www" and "no www" are 2 different domains, in practicality we use them interchangeably.
Hope this helps,
Don
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
-
Unsolved How To Check Outbound Links Of wesite?
I have a competitor website name Richmond Locksmith 24/7 How can i check its outbound links on moz??
Link Explorer | | Anjana96380 -
Unsolved Why am I not seeing search.yahoo.com in my site's backlink profile?
When looking at the backlinks for a client's competitor I found that they had a backlink on search.yahoo.com/reviews and our domain (harmonyhit.com) did not. I was using the Link Explorer tool. However, when I go to yahoo Search I see that the website of harmonyhit.com is indexed in Yahoo search and has links to the site. Also, it's sitemap has been recently crawled in Bing webmaster tools which Yahoo uses. Why does our client have the backlink accounted for and we do not?
Link Explorer | | DigitalThirdCoast0 -
Unsolved Links to my website are wrong
Hi, I have launch a new website, lorraine on october of 2021 and I have added it to a bunch a local and national directories to improme it local rankings. But when I get the domain authority and link data from MOZ it has only ten links and no one of them is from local/national directories. I have three questions: Do you know if it is normal that after 9 months DA is 1? Is there any problem with local/national directory links? I dont like buy links like others do but it seems the only way to improve domain authority and rankings.
Link Explorer | | Lorraine.es1 -
Open Site Explore page titles show as "No Title"
This has been asked many times but I cannot find an answer. On Open Site Explorer, most URLs I enter show as "No title" which means you have to hover over the URL to see which page is being referred to. I know you'd want an example, so here's your own site Moz.com 🙂 CWrkxZQ
Link Explorer | | clifra0 -
DA/PA Fluctuations: How to Interpret, Apply, & Understand These ML-Based Scores
Howdy folks, Every time we do an index update here at Moz, we get a tremendous number of questions about Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) scores fluctuating. Typically, each index (which release approximately monthly), many billions of sites will see their scores go up, while others will go down. If your score has gone up or down, there are many potential influencing factors: You've earned relatively more or less links over the course of the last 30-90 days.
Link Explorer | | randfish
Remember that, because Mozscape indices take 3-4 weeks to process, the data collected in an index is between ~21-90 days old. Even on the day of release, the newest link data you'll see was crawled ~21 days ago, and can go as far back as 90 days (the oldest crawlsets we include in processing). If you've done very recent link growth (or shrinkage) that won't be seen by our index until we've crawled and processed the next index. You've earned more links, but the highest authority sites have grown their link profile even more
Since Domain and Page Authority are on a 100-page scale, the very top of that represents the most link-rich sites and pages, and nearly every index, it's harder and harder to get these high scores and sites, on average, that aren't growing their link profiles substantively will see PA/DA drops. This is because of the scaling process - if Facebook.com (currently with a DA of 100) grows its link profile massively, that becomes the new DA 100, and it will be harder for other sites that aren't growing quality links as fast to get from 99 to 100 or even from 89 to 90. This is true across the scale of DA/PA, and makes it critical to measure a site's DA and a page's PA against the competition, not just trended against itself. You could earn loads of great links, and still see a DA drop due to these scaling types of features. Always compare against similar sites and pages to get the best sense of relative performance, since DA/PA are relative, not absolute scores. The links you've earned are from places that we haven't seen correlate well with higher Google rankings
PA/DA are created using a machine-learning algorithm whose training set is search results in Google. Over time, as Google gets pickier about which types of links it counts, and as Mozscape picks up on those changes, PA/DA scores will change to reflect it. Thus, lots of low quality links or links from domains that don't seem to influence Google's rankings are likely to not have a positive effect on PA/DA. On the flip side, you could do no link growth whatsoever and see rising PA/DA scores if the links from the sites/pages you already have appear to be growing in importance in influencing Google's rankings. We've done a better or worse job crawling sites/pages that have links to you (or don't)
Moz is constantly working to improve the shape of our index - choosing which pages to crawl and which to ignore. Our goal is to build the most "Google-shaped" index we can, representative of what Google keeps in their main index and counts as valuable/important links that influence rankings. We make tweaks aimed at this goal each index cycle, but not always perfectly (you can see that in 2015, we crawled a ton more domains, but found that many of those were, in fact, low quality and not valuable, thus we stopped). Moz's crawlers can crawl the web extremely fast and efficiently, but our processing time prevents us from building as large an index as we'd like and as large as our competitors (you will see more links represented in both Ahrefs and Majestic, two competitors to Mozscape that I recommend). Moz calculates valuable metrics that these others do not (like PA/DA, MozRank, MozTrust, Spam Score, etc), but these metrics require hundreds of hours of processing and that time scales linearly with the size of the index, which means we have to stay smaller in order to calculate them. Long term, we are building a new indexing system that can process in real time and scale much larger, but this is a massive undertaking and is still a long time away. In the meantime, as our crawl shape changes to imitate Google, we may miss links that point to a site or page, and/or overindex a section of the web that points to sites/pages, causing fluctuations in link metrics. If you'd like to insure that a URL will be crawled, you can visit that page with the Mozbar or search for it in OSE, and during the next index cycle (or, possibly 2 index cycles depending on where we are in the process), we'll crawl that page and include it. We've found this does not bias our index since these requests represent tiny fractions of a percent of the overall index (<0.1% in total). My strongest suggestion if you ever have the concern/question "Why did my PA/DA drop?!" is to always compare against a set of competing sites/pages. If most of your competitors fell as well, it's more likely related to relative scaling or crawl biasing issues, not to anything you've done. Remember that DA/PA are relative metrics, not absolute! That means you can be improving links and rankings and STILL see a falling DA score, but, due to how DA is scaled, the score in aggregate may be better predictive of Google's rankings. You can also pay attention to our coverage of Google metrics, which we report with each index, and to our correlations with rankings metrics. If these fall, it means Mozscape has gotten less Google-shaped and less representative of what influences rankings. If they rise, it means Mozscape has gotten better. Obviously, our goal is to consistently improve, but we can't be sure that every variation we attempt will have universally positive impacts until we measure them. Thanks for reading through, and if you have any questions, please leave them for us below. I'll do my best to follow up quickly.13 -
Spam score in bulk
Hi, Is there a way to check and export spam score of multiple sites at one go, like uploading links through an xl sheet and getting the spam scores checked for all the links at one shot? Thanks Amitabh
Link Explorer | | Ads4growth5 -
Do other sites linking to my page with a low domain authority affect my rankings?
Hello, my page authority 30, I see other page with an authority of 21 for example linking to us. Is this good or bad, does this affect our ranking? A lot of these don't have anchor text, I'm guessing we should reach out to these webmaster to include anchor text with the keywords we want to drive traffic to this page or make as descriptive as possible? Thanks! Laura
Link Explorer | | lauramrobinson320 -
Why doesn't my site show up in Moz Site Explorer
I started this website about 2 months ago, www.guyetteroofing.com. I know it still needs a lot of work, but I can't find any information on it on the site explorer tool.
Link Explorer | | billyguyette1