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.
I bought a 5 year old domain and has a spam score of 23%.....
-
A few months ago i bought a 5 year old domain and when i went to check in Moz pro the spam score, it shows its at 23%. DA is 1 everything else is 0.
The spam score shows 23% but there are no links at all for this website (see image)
I don't understand, there are no links at all going to this website. I checked google search console, analytics and tried looking for any links linking to this domain and there is none.
Even Moz isn't showing any links in the picture i provided above. Is this a glitch? Can i reset my spam score on this domain? Does that mean i wasted my money on this domain and now i can't rank with it?
Is there something im missing here. I also checked is there are any warnings or manual actions and it clearly says "No issues detected".
A few months earlier i bought a brand new domain very close to the 5 year old domain (new domain has a z instead of an s) and the spam score on that is 0 and DA is 1.
Given that the 5 year old domain has a 23% spam score, does that mean i should use the other new domain instead and redirect the 5 year old domain to the new website?
-
Hi thanks for the reply. These are the following i have done to my site and have kept these changes as so for close to 5 months that i had acquired the site for.
1. I turned off robot crawling for the entire site
2. I only have 2 pages which are privacy policy and home page (because the website is going under construction so i havne't added more pages)
3. I don't have any contact info or phone number listed on the site.So these changes i have mentioned line up to what you have mentioned and makes better sense now.
So once i launch the website and everything is flushed out just the way i need it, should i expect the spam score to reset itself to 0% then?
Thanks.
-
Hi there!
Alex here,
I know when you first look at your domain and see a spam score like that it can certainly be frustrating or scary, but don't panic. Just because your "spam score" is at 23% does NOT mean that your site or domain is actually spammy.
The way spam score works (and huge shoutout to the hard working team at Moz for creating it) is by looking at 27 different "signals" or "features" that _most _sites that are spam have, and comparing it to yours. A common misconception is that Spam Score is created by analyzing the links from other spammy sites and who they also link to. There are many factors.
That being said, your domain/site may be getting the score simply because it doesn't "pass" many of the signals like:
- Low number of pages found
- Domain name length
- No Phone Number Present
- Abnormally short or long URL path length
I encourage you to look over all the signals (and keep them in mind as you work with your domain) over at this helpful page:
https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-scoreThey include a super helpful video as well.
So in summary, feel free to use your domain. Don't get too worried off of the Spam Score alone.
I hope that answered your question and was helpful!
Best,
Alex Ratynski
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 Can Dollarpesa Website Achieve a High Google or Bing Ranking with a Domain Authority of DA 50+ on Moz?
Can Dollarpesa Website Achieve a High Google or Bing Ranking with a Domain Authority of DA 50+ on Moz? How to Attain Domain Authority of DA 50+ on Moz? everyone please help me
Moz Pro | | dollarpesa0 -
New blog site spam score is 40+ without any backlink
I have purchased a new domain ( Studytobecome.com ) from GoDaddy, before 15 days, and i just writing daily 1 article on my site, without any SEO, or backlinks, but now when I see in Moz spam score of my site after 15 days it shows 40+ without any links. How to reduce it, and whats the problem is, I don't understand.Please help me.5Vc6zl8
Moz Pro | | bhavierureu1 -
Comparing New vs. Old Keyword Difficulty Scores
We've had a few questions regarding the new Keyword Difficulty score used in Keyword Explorer, and how it compares to the old score in our stand-alone Keyword Difficulty tool. Specifically, people want to know why some scores are much lower using the new tool. There a general discussion of the math behind the tool in this post: Keyword Research in 2016: Going Beyond Guesswork One of the problems we had with the original Keyword Difficulty score is that, because it's based on our Page Authority (PA) score and PA tends toward the middle of the 0-100 range, Difficulty got a bit bunched up. A Difficulty score in the low-to-mid 20s (via the old tool) is actually very low. So, we set out to re-scale the new tool to broaden that score and use more of the 0-100 range. We hoped this would allow more granularity and better comparisons. While the logic is sound, we're concerned that we may have been too aggressive in this re-scaling, given recent feedback. So, we're going to be analyzing a large set of keywords (anonymously, of course) that people have run through the tool to see if too many Difficulty scores seem too low. If they do, we'll make some adjustments to the math. In the meantime, please be aware that low scores may appear lower in the new tool and very high scores may appear higher. We wanted to address some of the limitations in V1 and feedback over the years, and so the old and new scores really can't be compared directly in a meaningful way. We're sorry for any confusion that has caused, and we will re-evaluate if necessary.
Moz Pro | | Dr-Pete3 -
Domain Audit
Hi What is the best tool out there to doing a full brand audit for company. They've created at least 15 websites and have possibly many domain names which have been ordered by different people over many years. I need to find the quickest and best tool to do this with. Any suggestions would be great.
Moz Pro | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Potential spam websites with high DA linking back to us
Hey everybody, I'm going through all my sites and disavowing crap links. However, I'm having trouble distinguishing which high DA sites to disavow. What would you do? For example:
Moz Pro | | MEllsworth
https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=busca.starmedia.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score and https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis?site=cc879fe.activerain.com&target=domain&source=subdomain&page=1&sort=spam_score They both have tons of backlinks - both good and crap. The first has a DA of 72 and a Moz spam score of 4/17 and the second has a DA of 86 and a Moz spam score of 9/171 -
Relation between domain age and domain authority?
what is relation between domain age and domain authority? Old registered domain help for domain authority higher or not? if so, but i am still in confused, http://www.green-lotus-trekking.com/ this is too old domain but authority is only 33?
Moz Pro | | agsln1 -
Automatically Check List of Sites For Links To Specific Domain
Hi all, Can anyone recommend a tool that will allow me to put in a list of about 200 domains that are then checked for a link back to a specific domain? I know I can do various link searches and use Google site: command on a site by site basis, but it would be much quicker if there was a tool that could take the list of domains I am expecting a link on and then find if that link exists and if so on what page etc. Hope this makes sense otherwise I have to spend a day doing it by hand - not fun! Thanks,
Moz Pro | | MrFrisbee
charles.0 -
In alt tag of a image can we use #hashtag or domain.com ? Is that good SEO or not allowed ?
Some of the Google Search shows a title has a hashtag of an article, which contain keyword and while tweeting them, the title which has a hashtag automatically very good used for getting traffic to the blog. And other one, can we use the hash tag inside the alt attribute ? Or our domain name with .com in it. Like Google.com or #Google ?
Moz Pro | | Esaky0