Understanding spam analysis score

[KarenTDG]

Hi there,

I recently started looking into SEO and joined the Moz community. I'm trying to understand why my spam analysis score is so high (9/17). Our competitors look to have much lower spam scores so I'm wondering if this is negatively affecting our search engine rankings. Our website is www.tdgbs.com.au. We are a small accounting firm in a rural Australian community.

I've read as much as I can find about the spam analysis score but am still unsure how to fix it. According to Moz, our website has the following spam flags:

**Low MozTrust or Moz Rank Score, Large Site With Few Links, Small Proportion of Branded Links: **I understand that all of these in theory have to do with the fact that we have only one incoming link. We are working on this. What confuses me is that our main competitors also only have one or two incoming links and don't seem to raise this flag. Again, we are a small company in a small community so there are only really a small number of links we can cultivate before it gets too spammy.

**Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Subdomains/Domains: **Again, I'm guessing this has to do with the fact that we have only one incoming (followed) link, but again, our competitors don't seem to raise this flag. Is there a reason why only one link would raise this flag?

**Thin Content: **We do have some short articles but I didn't think they would be short enough to warrant a "thin content" flag. Again, some of our competitors have pages that our just as short and don't have this flag.

**Low Number of Internal Links: **We do have internal links, so I'm wondering if they're not getting picked up for some reason? I did go through and add a few more today, but I don't want it to be too overwhelming.

**No Contact Info: **We do have contact info, and plenty of it, so I'm not sure why we're raising this flag.

**Low Number of Pages Found: **We do have a decent number of pages (I would have thought), and again, no less than our competitors. I've tested on Google and it looks like it is getting a valid response to our pages.

I've been tasked with improving our SEO relative to our competitors and I'm wondering if these flags have to do with the fact that we're ranking lower. Our website is relatively new (2 months) and our domain name is also newer than our competitors, so I'm wondering if that's impacting things. Any insight you could provide on how to reduce the spam score would be great.

Thank you!

[KarenTDG]

Thanks Samantha, this is really helpful!

[samantha.chapman]

Hi Karen!

This data is updated much more often, you're right! About once a month actually - you can see our most recently updated schedule here as well as some more technical metrics on our Mozscape API Updates page. You can also see when the last and next updates happened on the Open Site Explorer (OSE) homepage at any time.

Just a few points on how we compile our index:

• We grab the most recent index.
• We take the top 10 billion URLs with the highest MozRank (with a fixed limit on some of the larger domains).
• We start crawling from the top down until we've crawled ~130 billion URLs

The idea here is that we're focusing on the highest-quality links we can find, coming from the most prominent pages of authoritative sites. So, while you may not see every link for a site within our index, we're aiming to report the most valuable ones available.

Most new sites and links will be indexed by our spiders and available in Mozscape and Open Site Explorer within 60 days, but some take even longer for many reasons - including the crawl-ability of sites, the number of inbound links to them, and the depth of pages in subdirectories (so, given how new your site is, I wouldn't worry too much just yet - just remember to focus on consistent/quality link building so that we're pointed to your site during our indexing process).

When we collect this data, we’re looking specifically for the most valuable links and, rather than crawling your entire site or every site, we collect this by starting our crawler on a few highest ranking sites and letting it perform a breadth first search to see what it finds.

For each page that we crawl, we first collect each of it’s links before following these and collecting the details of each page that these link to and so on. There’s a set limit of links that we’ll crawl per page and pages that we’ll crawl per site so it’s expected that we may not follow every link on your site this way (so we won't always find all available links internally or externally).

Generally, we recommend using a wide variety of backlink tools to get the most illustrative picture of how your site's backlink profile looks. OSE and Ahrefs index differently and have different purposes. Ahrefs is good for quantity while OSE is great for finding higher quality links. Domain Authority is our own proprietary metric that is closely correlated to Google rankings, so our customers often use OSE to research influential sites to build links.

You can read more about how we build our index in our guide here.

I know this is a ton of information, so if you have any questions or if I didn't make anything clear enough, please don't hesitate to ask!

[KarenTDG]

Thanks Samantha! So on a related note, should I be concerned that Open Site Explorer can't find any internal links for my website? I'm assuming that must be updated more often since it has correctly found a more recent external link.

[samantha.chapman]

Hi Karen,

Yes, this could absolutely be the case! Given that the Spam Score is generally only updated around every six months or so, I would take the results you're seeing with a grain of salt. It's still good to look at the flags to see if any might be relevant but if you've determined that they're not, I wouldn't worry. The Spam Score is really just a guide to help you to adjust your site to be as good as it possibly can be - it doesn't necessarily mean there is anything you need to change.

[KarenTDG]

Thank you for your prompt response Samantha! So the spam score I'm seeing might well be from our old website, rather than our new one (2 months old)?

[samantha.chapman]

Hi there,

Thanks so much for writing in and sorry about any confusion!

I think I can help explain why you're seeing that info in Open Site Explorer. Unlike the rest of the metrics available there, Spam Score doesn't update each month with the rest of the index update. The Spam Analysis section updates on a completely separate schedule, and much less frequently; usually around every 6 months or so. So it's entirely possible that you're seeing Spam flags that are no longer relevant to your site.

It's always best to trust your instincts: for example, you know you've got contact info on the site, so you can safely ignore that warning.

I'd recommend checking out this article & video that our co-founder Rand wrote on our Spam Analysis tool (they're absolutely the best way I've found to understand this metric) - but I'll also be happy to add some key takeaways from these resources, as well.

Article: Spam Score: Moz's New Metric to Measure Penalization Risk

Video: Understanding and Applying Moz's Spam Score Metric - Whiteboard Friday

Essentially, Spam Score is an aggregate of 17 different flags we set up to identify traits that correlate with measured Google penalization. The higher the number of flags on a link, the higher the chance that it's spammy.

The flags represent a wide variety of potential signals ranging from content concerns to low authority metrics. Since this is just based on correlation with penalization, rather than causation, the solution isn't necessarily to change these factors on your site, but it could be worthwhile to consider them.

Since the Spam Score isn't updated quite as often as other metrics, if you've seen a flag and determined that it is irrelevant after looking at your site, I'd say it's safe to move forward this way:).

I hope this helps! Let me know if you have any other questions or if there's anything that needs clarifying!