Spam Score of 7??

[Rachel_J]

Hi,

I recently took on a client for local SEO and i started improving his on page optimization etc and now I'm continuing with link building. It's hard since it's a boring industry (medical waste disposal), but I have gotten some links.

When I check up his link profile in OSE, it's still giving me a spam score of 7!!! and not showing the links I have acquired. I already removed the link it's showing up by contacting the website and it's not there anymore. The site is a very clean nice site, why am I getting such a high spam score?

Thanks for your help!

Rachel

[Rachel_J]

Chris,

I really appreciate the time and effort you put into this thorough answer! Truly proud to be part of such a great community!

You said some really great points and put some of my worries to ease. I will continue link building and making a few corrections.

Thanks again for your helpful advice!

Rachel

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Rachel,

Not a problem, glad to hear you're on the right track! It's great to see the pages looking unique and much better for UX.

Looking at the elements flagged in your spam score breakdown, there are some relatively easy fixes in here still which may be contributing at least somewhat. To answer your question directly I would expect it will still be related to your link profile meaning less poor links and more quality ones will be the fix.

Don't forget that this score isn't a direct Google metric either. The entire Spam Score system is meant to be little more than a system of red flags for you to investigate - having a bad spam score isn't inherently a bad thing but it also shouldn't go ignored.

As for whether or not the Spam Score takes disavowed links into account, I can't find confirmation for this either way but I'd doubt it. This would require them having access to your Search Console to see the disavowed file.

Low MozTrust or MozRank Score / Large Site with Few Links These will obviously be resolved with ongoing link building but are likely the most significant factor in current score.

Small Proportion of Branded Links As you go about your link building, it tends to happen naturally but be sure to continue building links that use your brand name as the anchor.

Large Number of External Links You do have a fair volume of external links but they all appear to be legitimate so I'd ignore this one.

Low Number of Internal Links This one is quite valid. Beyond the nav I couldn't really see any internal linking practices going on. They shouldn't be promotional links within your blogs but just making sure that any piece of content that may be relevant to another page also includes a link. For example, if we mention Adwords on our SEO page, we'd include a link to our Adwords page for users who may want more information.

No Contact Info
May be caused by the fact that the phone number tends to show up with slightly unusual formatting in each instance; either:

• 855.4.CYNTOX (429.6869)
• 855.429.6869

I'd be interested to see if changing this to just 855 429 6869 would clear that flag in the spam score. Applying schema markup here may also help.

External Links in Navigation This seems to be referring to the nav links to your login areas so it's another area I wouldn't really worry about. Changing this would frustrate users for the sake of satisfying an arbitrary checkpoint in this list which is exactly what we're not supposed to do with a tool like this!

On an interesting side note, ahrefs is still showing 42 obviously spammy referring domains. This won't change anything to do with your spam score since Moz isn't pulling Ahrefs metrics but it may not be great for your Google rankings if they're seeing the same links.

[Rachel_J]

Hey Chris,

Thanks for steering me in the right direction way back in May! I was wondering what you'd suggest now... I improved the 50 pages with unique content and disavowed the links I couldn't remove, but I still have that horrible spam score :(.

Should I simply disregard it? Also, does OSE count the links that were disavowed?

Thank you,

Rachel

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Rachel, no problem at all, happy to help out!

We have a couple of clients in similar industries where it seems most of their successful competitors are using black hat tactics to get ahead and it seems to be working for them for now.

These clients are still too new to us to report anything valuable just yet - they're certainly moving ahead and I don't see an issue outranking their dodgy competitors, it's just frustrating that black hat SEO is typically much faster but their rankings could drop literally any day.

That aside, a disavow may help you somewhat but I always recommend spending the time removing as many as you can (without paying the removal fees that many will request!). Building new, high quality and relevant links will also help swing that ratio away from being almost exclusively spam. Everybody has at least some dodgy links to don't stress too much about getting it perfect, just improve the ratio.

It's great that you've got unique content coming and regional differences in law and restrictions is a great starting point for offering that unique value as well. Location pages like this are just fine, so long as they each serve a unique purpose. Just make sure the site structure and content caters to the user's intent, not just adding content to keyword-specific pages.

I would expect that removing as many of those bad links as you can, building quality new ones and improving the site's content will go a long way to lowering your spam score and more importantly, moving one step closer to driving qualified and converting traffic.

[Rachel_J]

Hi Chris,

Thanks so much for putting in the time and effort to look into the website and answer my question.

This industry in general is full of spam and doorway pages (probably because of the hardship of getting quality links) but our competitors who have more links and spam are doing better than us and have a better spam score. Do you think if I disavow those links it will help?

You are very right about the pages that seem to be extraneous but I am actively curating content and they will be unique landing pages. Every state has its own laws and quirks in regards to medical waste and we will be focusing on that.

Do you think when I finish those task I will be able to rank better and have a lower spam rate?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks again!

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Rachel,

I've just spent a minute or two having a look over the site and link profile and there are quite few reasons why the spam score would be so high.

Looking at the link profile to start with, most of the links are made up of SEO directories and blog comment spam and this alone would be reason enough to consider the site spammy.

Looking at the onsite work, at first glance things don't seem too bad until I let Screaming Frog crawl it. There are some internal links pointing to 301s which isn't great efficiency for crawl budget but far more problematic is the ~50 pages that exist purely to chase a particular keyword. They don't offer any value to the user at all and are very direct in the keyword they target with only ~50 words of the same content on each with the location changed.

For example:
https://cyntox.com/oklahoma/
https://cyntox.com/north-dakota/
https://cyntox.com/ohio/

Here are a couple of resources to better understand the Spam Score. Matt provided them in another thread and they proved very handy, just don't fall into the trap of only fixing elements that Moz looks at to lower the score; produce a stronger and more genuine website instead!

Blog Post
Whiteboard Friday

As is so often the case with Moz's spam score, if you want to lower the spam score you just need to lower the spam I hope that helps!