I bought a 5 year old domain and has a spam score of 23%.....

[Nor123]

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)

https://imgur.com/a/3lHjLEh

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?

[Nor123]

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.

[Alex_Ratynski]

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-score

They 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