Spam Score
-
My site has a spam score of 2/17. How bad is this?
Domain authority is 23 and page authority is 32. The domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com.
In total, according to MOZ, there are 38 inbound links. Spam scores for the inbound links are as follows:
1 (8)
1 (6)
2 (5)
2 (4)
3 (3)
16 (2)
4 (1)
8 (0)The number in the parentheses represents spam score.
Does it make sense to get some of these links removed? Is it necessary for me to remove links from all sites with a spam score of 5,6,7,8?
If we remove these lower quality links will Domain Authority and Page Authority improve?
Thanks, Alan
-
Hi Kingalan - first off, I'd recommend checking out http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday which will give you a pretty good overview of what Spam Score is and how it works.
I wouldn't worry about firing two flags - Moz triggers a few, and many good sites do as well. If they're things you want to fix anyway, go for it, but Spam Score flags aren't about saying "this is necessarily bad" or "this definitely needs fixing." It's merely identifying features that, when added together, show correlations with sites we saw Google penalize/ban.
As far as your links go - that distribution seems fine to me, too. If you want, you could look at the highest flag count links and if you believe they're problematic after manually reviewing, go ahead and give them the boot (via disavow or getting the site to remove them). The flag count is merely to help you order your manual review - it should never replace the process of actually looking at those links and determining which should be kept/removed.
-
2/17 isn't bad I think that's less than a 5 percent chance of having any Google problems. What those flags are is more important. Rand has said a few times that the flags are not suggestions to fix something. They are simply correlations. Many of the flags can not be avoided for some sites. I wouldn't worry about a 2/17 score. Look at what the flags are and if they are things you can change and feel you should then do it.
As far as removing links goes, these flags can be a good indicator for further investigation in my opinion. I personally am going to investigate sites that have 5 or more but the final decision will be based on my normal link evaluations. Does the link link with spammy sites, does it hold any relevance to my site, does it drive desired traffic to my site, does it help or hurt my brand, does it exist only to create links, etc. etc. I would not advise saying well any links that have over 5 or 8 flags I am now going to get rid of or disavow. Use it as an indicator and then do good research on the suspect sites.
I can't speak to PA and DA impact as I am not sure if spam score is being included into those at this time. My understanding is that they are not. If they are really poor links then get rid of them regardless of PA and DA. Where you have a low amount of links then I would say yes a single poor link could have a greater impact on your ranking than it would on a site with thousands of links. That's all just my 2 cents though.
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
-
Solved How to reduce the spam score for my domain?
My domain longfeifei.com is for a regular company website and someone sent a lot of external links on different low-quality websites on the internet. Now the score is very high about 75%. If I disavow the unusual links from google search console. Is it possible to reduce the spam score? Is MOZ associated with GOOGLE Data? Thanks,
Moz Pro | | niaokun6838071 -
Spam links with high DA
I'm running through the spam analysis and noticed a few links that are considered to be 9+ on the spam score (high spam level), but some of them have DA of 60 -75. How can this be possible? When I view the sites they appear to be be pretty low quality. If i'm considering disavowing a site should I focus on spam score or DA? A DA of 75 is a pretty reputable standing.
Moz Pro | | STP_SEO0 -
Getting spam Links pointing to our wrong url, what to do?
Hey Mozzers, Looking in my Google Search Console (Webmaster Tools), I'm getting links pointing to bogus pages on my website that result in a 404. What does one do so you can tell Google that it has been "fixed"? Do i just 301 it to another website? If I add it to my disavow list, does Google remove the error in my webmaster tools? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | Shawn1240 -
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 -
Spam score by moz
como puedo estar seguro de que los enlaces toxicos que informa la herramienta moz spam score, son realmente malos para mi seo? Algunos de ellos parecen totalmente buenos! gracias!! as I can be sure that the toxic links moz tool reports the spam score, they are actually bad for my SEO? Some of them seem totally good!
Moz Pro | | Sbm20080 -
What could cause your Domain Authority score to drop?
We have 3 websites that are on 3 different campaigns. Our flagship website is www.cannontrading.com. The Domain Authority score on it was 42. When I first (Mid November 2012) started, we had 295 keywords allocated for Cannontrading.com and 5 other keywords for allocated to our other websites... e-futures.com and e-mini.com. What I wanted to do was optimize the other two pages and I did this by taking taking 50 the keywords that were not ranked in the top 50 from Cannontrading.com and assigned them to the our other two sites. Could this have caused the drastic drop in the score? Our keyword rankings for the "Top 3" has dropped from 93 to 34 since November 2012. We did have a company that did article submissions for us up till October 2012. Could this have caused our drop in the Domain Authority Score and our Keyword Rankings? I didn't make any other changes to Cannon website beside taking away those keywords and given them to our other sites. Any suggestions or thoughts would really help me. Regards, David
Moz Pro | | ACann0 -
Twitter Page Authority Score?
I've been doing some competitive research in Open Site Explorer and many of our competitors have Twitter accounts very similar to ours. Their Twitter pages are usually one of the pages with linking to their website with the most Page Authority. The incoming links from Twitter are a "no follow" as you would guess. This has been the case for a large number of well ranking sites I have looked at. www.dremed.com also has a Twitter account at: https://twitter.com/#!/DREmed . However, Open Site Explorer does not list the Twitter link as an incoming link at all ( or if it does it has no Page Authority ). The Twitter account page seems very similar in nature to other competing Twitter pages. I'm not sure why it does not ALSO pull a high Page Authority score??? Do you know why this might be? Best, Justin
Moz Pro | | justinjeffries0 -
Spam Directories creating misleading Authority ratings
How does the website www.starsdirectory.com.ar get a Domain Authority of 54 and a Page Authority of 61 when Google quite correctly gives it a PR 0? It is clearly a spam directory, which Google has recognised. It is very misleading using OSE or Campaign Management when sites such as these (and there are hundreds more we have found) are skewing the results of competitiors through the use of spam links. Is there no way that SEOMoz tools can identify such spam sites when they create their ratings?
Moz Pro | | paulsmithlondon0