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.
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?
-
Hi there!
Don is absolutely right that spam score values varying by subdomain, as that's how we make distinctions for the metric.With that being said, spam score of a given subdomain is not particularly easily influenced by the types of sites that are linking to it. Most of the 17 possible spam flags (which can be viewed here: https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/spam-analysis/flags?subdomain=www.penn-criminallawyers.com) are reflective of on-site factors within the subdomain itself. So, while I agree that spam score is not particularly well-adjusted to speak to the fact that http://www.penn-criminallawyers.com/ has some serious issues with their inbound links, it's worth noting that they didn't necessarily have to have cultivated all of those backlinks for themselves. I'm certainly not trying to go down the rabbit hole of spam conspiracy theories, but simply accounting for the fact that anyone can create a link to any site (unless disavows are involved), and it could be rash to judge a subdomain's "spammyness" based purely on their inbound external link profile.
Spam score is based on these 17 flags based on correlation (not causation) research that was done by Moz's data scientists, and it also makes the acknowledgement that there will be penalized sites with low spam , as well as non-penalized sites with a high spam score. For more context on that, I'd highly recommend that anyone looking into using spam score watch this explanation from Rand on the topic: https://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday
To clarify, am I advocating that http://www.penn-criminallawyers.com/ is not a spammy site based on what spam score says? Nope. I'm not even speaking to that topic at all. For all I know, it certainly could be (and maybe I'm even inclined to think it is).
Am I saying that spam score is a value you should take at face value without doing any digging into the specific subdomains, themselves? Certainly not. I would stress doing serious research any time you're looking into spam, credibility or disavowing; it's simply there to serve as a potential source of guiding information.
Hope this helps!
-
Hi,
You may also want to check the domain variations. http://penn-criminallawyers.com/ and http://www.penn-criminallawyers.com/
If you look at the www version you will see a spam score of 4/10. You'll need to make sure you set the filter to "this root domain"
It could be that at some point the website used the www but have since switched to no www. There are some inconsistency like that with the tool. Technically "www" and "no www" are 2 different domains, in practicality we use them interchangeably.
Hope this helps,
Don
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 remove these spammy links
I've noticed that my website's spam score has increased recently, and upon further investigation, I found some spammy links pointing to my site. and my website www.fastlandoffer.com Moz Smap Score is 16
Link Explorer | | FredericoSeo
5 I haven't engaged in any spammy tactics, so I'm not sure how they got there. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions on how to effectively remove these spammy links from my website and improve its overall credibility and search engine rankings? Any insights or experiences would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance!0 -
Unsolved Why am I not seeing search.yahoo.com in my site's backlink profile?
When looking at the backlinks for a client's competitor I found that they had a backlink on search.yahoo.com/reviews and our domain (harmonyhit.com) did not. I was using the Link Explorer tool. However, when I go to yahoo Search I see that the website of harmonyhit.com is indexed in Yahoo search and has links to the site. Also, it's sitemap has been recently crawled in Bing webmaster tools which Yahoo uses. Why does our client have the backlink accounted for and we do not?
Link Explorer | | DigitalThirdCoast0 -
Site has DA of 26 but no backlinks
I'm asking this for a guy over at SEOchat: http://forums.seochat.com/new-user-seo-questions-answers-123/unusual-change-domain-authority-486962.html Here's what his post says: Exclamation Unusual Change in Domain authority
Link Explorer | | ThomasHarvey
Guys and Girls, I'm having a weird issue in one of my sites , thing is the site had DA 11 in July and however when check on September Site is having 26 without me doing any type of link building and there are no new posts for this month as well. When checked using open site explorer there are no backlinks indexed in their Mozcape index as well. Site: http://www.beijingtravelchannel.com/ Can you give me any plausible reasons for this to happen, so that i can check them out. Thanks in Advance.0 -
Spam Score and crawling of my site
Hello, I'm trying to analyze the spam score of my site which is 9/17 Actually I have few backlinks and all of them have a low spam score (max 4/17, just one). I think there's some kind of issue with the crawler since I get strange spam factors: Large Site with Few Links (likely true, I recently deleted a lot of tags used once) Low Number of Pages Found (wasn't it a "Large Site"??) Low Number of Internal Links (I got a considerable number) No Contact Info (I have a link to my facebook in the menu and a "contacts" page) Thin Content (It's just a blog with min 300 words per post, why thin?) Site Link Diversity is Low (likely true) Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Subdomains (likely true) Low MozTrust or MozRank Score (true) Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Domains (likely true) Can you please help me to understand it, is it a crawling problem or similar? If needed I will post the url of the website. Thank you so much Marco
Link Explorer | | MarcoBP0 -
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 -
Do other sites linking to my page with a low domain authority affect my rankings?
Hello, my page authority 30, I see other page with an authority of 21 for example linking to us. Is this good or bad, does this affect our ranking? A lot of these don't have anchor text, I'm guessing we should reach out to these webmaster to include anchor text with the keywords we want to drive traffic to this page or make as descriptive as possible? Thanks! Laura
Link Explorer | | lauramrobinson320 -
Open Site Explorer Recently Discovered Links Question
Hey Mozzers, I have a question regarding the Open Site Explorer Recently Discovered Links. I know that I have receive follow link from a few sites that have more DA than my site. I am wondering why it is taking so long for OSE to discover these links? I double checked the sites to make sure that they don't have NOFOLLOW (sorry for the double negative), and the sites have linked to my site for over a month now. Any ideas? I'm not concerned about it because Search Engines have discovered those links. I am just curious why this is, or if it is normal. Cheers!
Link Explorer | | evan890 -
A simple count (with list if possible) of the external and internal links on a website
Dear Moz Community, I am trying to find a way to easily analyse a website (http://uk.chm-cbd.net) to determine the number of internal and external hyperlinks throughout the (roughly) 490 webpages within the site. It would also be extremely helpful to have a list of all the links with their url. Does anyone know of a tool, methodology to do this? If it requires a lot of programming then that does not help me very much as I am not very computer literate!! So a software to download or an online service would be very helpful. Open Site Explorer seems to be limited, such that I would have to do an analysis on each page within the website. BUT, if anyone knows how I can do using OSE, then please tell me. Thanks in advance to anyone who may be able to help Hugh
Link Explorer | | HLConsulting0