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.
Spam Score increased Sudden
-
Hey,
My website Spam score increased suddenly. We had 1% spam score, Now it's 50%, We don't have many spammy website links, spammy links already disavowed. Why the spam score increased.
After checking the 27 signals we found we blocked Google Fonts API, Is this the issue?
When is the date of the next update in the spam score?
Waiting for an Expert opinion.
Thanks in Advance
Neethu
-
Hey there!
Thanks for reaching out to us!
When did your spam score increase? Our spam score updates quarterly.
Spam Score in Links and Link Explorer represents the percentage of sites with similar features we've found to be penalized or banned by Google. Our machine learning model identified 27 common features among the millions of banned or penalized sites in the data we fed it. Unfortunately we are not SEO consultants so we would not be able to pinpoint the exact reason for the increase.
You can read more about Spam Score on our Help Hub - including an awesome video that explains how to use the score as well as the factors we use to calculate the score.
Your spam score does not mean that your site is definitely spammy. The percentage represents a wide variety of potential signals ranging from content concerns to low authority metrics. Since this is based on correlation with penalization, rather than causation, the solution isn't necessarily to change these factors on your site, but it may be worthwhile to consider them. It is best to use this percentage figure to judge the quality of inbound links to your site, giving you a signal to help you determine which of those links needs some further investigation and, perhaps, even removal.
Feel free to write into help@moz.com with any further questions,
Best,
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 decrease spam score
Why spam score of my website is 78 in moz. I had disaow bad backlinks in 2023 and it's still showing my spam score too high. Help me to decrease it. alt text
Link Explorer | | Faizali.7860 -
Unsolved when is the spam score updated?
when is the spam score updated?
Link Explorer | | Tv24.ro
we have been waiting since December to see an update of the spam score and moz is lying to us continuously. Shame, whenever we ask questions, they don't answer us, I think they almost make fun of people.
I requested an update to antena24, tv24, digi24, alba24, g4media, b1tv,newsela0 -
View domain authority and spam score history
Hello,
Link Explorer | | dtesmino
Is it possible to get historical data of DA/SS through link explorer? what about the mozscape api?
i have seen the "Metrics over time" page, but it only shows 1 year of data.
There is a website which provides DA history for 2+ years but i'd like to use moz or it's api directly
Thanks in advance2 -
How is Moz DA affected by spam links? Disavow file?
So it does not appear that moz let's you upload your disavow file. So when moz calculates your DA how do spammy links factor in? After digging through our GA it appears our site was hit with the 2016 penguin update and never recovered. Our weekly visitors were 2k, then dropped to 500 and have stayed close to that level for a while. We've used the disavow tool, without success over the past 3 years. During that time we have done link out reach and built around 10 legit good quality DA links since. But we have not recovered. At this point i'm thinking I should just remove the disavow file. Moz says our spam score for our domain is 5%.
Link Explorer | | jessicapremier0 -
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? DrokMbP
Link Explorer | | usDragons0 -
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 -
Not existing domains linking to my website (spam)
Hello, When i run my platform www.taobao.nl through https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ i see a lot of nasty adult domains that link to my platform. These give a very negative (spam)score to my platform. I already disavowed quite a few via Webmastertools, but they keep coming. When i check the names in the Whois, they don't even seem to exist! (anymore) What could cause this and how can i end it?? Thanks for your help! Sander
Link Explorer | | benhond1