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
-
Does increase in DA increase Moz Trust score?
I have checked many website which in my office. Have a confusion Does increase in DA increase Moz Trust score? I have a website https://emocrest.com/ which is new one and Moz Trust score as of now is 1 only. Well, most of the projects I'm handling in our office having 2,3,4 in the range. How this MT value is calculated and does it got any relation with the change in Domain Authoiry or the page authority of a website?
Moz Pro | | nazfazy1 -
Anchor Text - easy loans spam
Hi Moz Gurus, I've been trying for over a year now to clean our website from a virus that hit us. This virus created internal links to these spam- pay day loans, easy loans websites, as well as thousands of external links linking to our domain, and for a while our page redirected to another website. From thousands of links we've managed to get it down to 300, now to 100 ( changed into 410) URL errors that still appear on google webmaster tools under crawl errors. We had our website on Wordpress, currently we are working manually using FTP access. Looking at Moz Open Site Explorer - 90% of the Anchor text for the Root Domain appear as : easy pay day loans etc. How do I get rid of this? Or what is to do in this case? Does it reflect bad on the SEO that the anchor text is not matching our keywords? Looking forward to your reply. If you wish to look at the website: www.manvanlondon.co.uk
Moz Pro | | monicapopa0 -
New Website & DA Score
We are preparing to build a new website for a branch of our company. According to Neil Patel (whom I highly respect) our DA should come in around 30 (categorizing us as a startup, see chart below). So I ask: Why do our current sites DA Score below 30? (20 & 29 respectively) Our sites were redesigned in 2013 and are responsive, pass the Google Mobile Friendly test and I've improved load speed by over 25% by compressing images. I have used Moz as guidance for 10 months on both 7 + yo sites, HP.com is 14 yo, our pages score in the high 90's and I have disavowed bad backlinks for 6 months (now only every other month). I thought we would be in or close to the 50 range by 2017 after a solid year of improvements, but I don't see that happening. Our scores go up a point or two, then back down, we have floundered 2 points either way for 10 months. Most important question: What do I do now to raise our DA? Lastly, my plan is to take all the lessons learned from the past years and apply it to the new site, measure the success and then redesign the other two sites in accordance to the new model. But that may be a year away. KJr www.heritageprinting.com www.heritageprintingcharlotte.com | DA | Rating |
Moz Pro | | KevnJr
| 1-10 | Poor – Your site is young and weak. You have a lot of growing to do. |
| 11-20 | Decent. Your site isn’t stellar, but you’re doing better. It would be good to grow. |
| 21-30 | Fair. Your site shows signs of SEO, but there are many things you can and should do to improve. |
| 31-40 | Competitive. A lot of startups find themselves in this DA range. It’s not bad, and you’re beginning to get close to the sweet spot. |
| 41-50 | Good. Now, you’re getting somewhere. This is a nice place to be, and many good e-commerce sites find themselves squarely in this category. |
| 51-60 | Strong. As you swing out of the lower half of the scale, you’re beginning to get much healthier. This is a good place to be. |
| 61-70 | Excellent. A DA at this level represents a great site with a lot of recognition, a lot of link backs, and a considerable authority in its niche. Many .edus are in this space. |
| 71-80 | Outstanding. You’re dominating in the SERPs and owning your niche. Quick Sprout is a 73. |
| 81-90 | Very outstanding. You’re in the upper echelons of authority. You can consider yourself to have arrived. |
| 91-100 | Rare. These sites are household names — Wikipedia, Facebook, New York Times, etc. Your site will probably never attain this level. Only a miniscule fraction of a percentage of sites on the Internet ever get this high. | https://www.quicksprout.com/2014/04/09/how-to-score-your-websites-seo-in-10-minutes-or-less/0 -
GOOGLE ANALYTIC SKEWED DATA BECAUSE OF GHOST REFERRAL SPAM ND CRAWL BOTS
Hi Guys, We are having some major problems with our Google Analytics and MOz account. Due to the large number of ghost/referral spam and crawler bots we have added some heavy filtering to GA. This seems to be working protecting the data from all these problems but also filtering out much needed data that is not coming through. In example, we used to get a hundred visitors a day at the least and now we are down to under ten. ANYBODY PLEASE HELP. HAVE READ THROUGH MANY ARTICLES WITH NO FIND TO PERMANENT SOLID SOLUTION (even willing to go with paid service instead of GA) Thank You so Much, S.M.
Moz Pro | | KristyKK0 -
Can we disavow all spammy looking sites in OSE with a spam score of 5 or above?
Hello, We'd like to use OSE to make a disavow list. Can we just go through everything with a spam score of 5 or higher that looks like spam when we visit the site and disavow all of them? I'll be using Moz pro, are there any other free tools that I can utilize? What do I keep in mind? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | BobGW0 -
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 -
Moz Spam Analysis vs. GWMT Links to Your Site
Hi Moz Community, I have been conducting some link auditing and started comparing the Moz Spam Analysis tool with the links provided in Google WMT. It appears that the Moz Spam Analysis tools shows an aggregate of links that Moz may or may not consider spam, however when you download and look at Google's "Links to Your Site" list it provides every link iteration known to man that's pointing to the target website - without providing any hints as to whether or not a link may be considered spam by Google. The biggest concern I have here is that Google is picking up a lot of links, which I consider spam, that do not appear in the Moz Spam Analysis results. I guess the question(s) I have are: Does it make sense to compare these two data sets? Has anyone else tried this comparison and how did you use the information to make positive changes? Any recommendations when it comes to determining if an external link is spam/hurting/helping a website? Thank you!
Moz Pro | | GoogleDowner0 -
How can I increase my domain authority score?
We've jumped up in our rankings, page authority scores, and our toolbar PR over the past year, but our domain authority score remains the same as it was this time last year. I have noticed that for most people's sites, domain authority is typically higher than page authority, and my suspicion is that our domain authority score staying static is capping our page authority potential to some degree. Our SEOmoz scores are quite low for our toolbar PR. I've looked at the SEOmoz page relating to domain authority, and it rather vaguely says 'improve SEO generally across your site'. Other than age, the only thing I can think of is that maybe we have backlinks ranging across too broad a spectrum of topics. Being a web hosting company, we get a lot of links from our customers' sites that aren't related to our industry. Anyone got any specific advice? To provide some context, it's a PR7 website that's around a decade old with links in the hundred thousands. We score just 59 for domain authority. Thanks in advance, Jenni
Moz Pro | | Jenni_HeartInternet0