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Thanks Samantha, this is really helpful!

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.

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)?

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!