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    4. How Much Time It Will Take To Lower the Spam Score?

    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 Much Time It Will Take To Lower the Spam Score?

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    • rajas2019
      rajas2019 last edited by

      I'm facing an issue with my website. Due to little to no knowledge about link building and backlink, i created backlinks without checking the quality and spam score of the sites. Now there are many sites linking to my website but the overall spam score is very high of my website and my domain is reviewheart.com that i'm talking about. I have created a list and disavowed all he poor linking domains but still no improvement shown. Can anyone have the idea how much time moz will take to show the updated spam score as i have disavowed all the low quality spammed linking site?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
      • NadiaEira00
        NadiaEira00 last edited by

        I also have the same question. But now I can't see my Spam Core in my cookie clicker 2 website.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • sarahwalsh
          sarahwalsh last edited by

          You have to work hard on improving your organic SEO, by removing anything that could be deemed as spam / or low quality seo- for example if you have spam backlinks these should be removed by your seo agency. Your web designers, should also only add high quality, well written text.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • effectdigital
            effectdigital last edited by

            If you're talking about the Moz spam score of the domain, it's higher than many would like but it's not extremely high:

            https://d.pr/i/4WwfDq.png (screenshot)

            A score of 80 or higher is indicative of very, very spammy sites. Although lots of strong language is used within the tool, 50% isn't super awful really. By the way, Moz is not connected to your disavow file and cannot see it (something many have requested many times, which I continue to request at any given opportunity). As such, disavow work will not decrease your Moz spam score

            Moz's spam score is not something which Google use within their ranking algorithm(s). Google have private spam metrics which they do not share with webmasters. Moz's spam score is simply an attempt by our industry to make our 'best guess' at how spammy Google 'might' think a website is. Ultimately though, it's just an indicator and a 'shadow metric', it's meant to mimic the decisions that Google might make but Google (again) does not actually use any Moz metrics (at all) within their ranking algorithm(s)

            Your disavow file goes straight to Google, so even if Moz doesn't see it and their best 'guess' is that your spam score is still high, you know that 'actual Google' have seen your disavow work and thus Moz's spam metric is not likely to be accurate for your domain (which is why it's only an indicator, even when looking at other domains, as you don't know what link removal and disavow work they have carried out)

            If you want your actual Moz spam score to go down (though there is no reason for such vanity, as Google doesn't use Moz metrics) then you have to actually remove the links and that's that (sorry)

            Remember that the spam score is derived based on factors which Moz perceives as being common to penalised websites:

            Spam Score: "Represents the percentage of sites with similar features we've found to be penalized or banned by Google." ~ Moz

            This is not necessarily linked to backlink features in isolation, I would expect that some on-page features may be counted. The site just doesn't look and feel very legit:

            1.) A review site, with only seven reviews, one of which appears to be for a gun or fire-arm (paintball or not, it's a gun)

            2.) No seeming ability for any users to add their own reviews, so this is just one person's biased voice. Why does the internet need this website?

            3.) Logo is blurry and low-res and doesn't look 'proper'

            4.) Only three pages seem to exist. One of these pages is a 'disclaimer'. Webmasters put up disclaimers when, they should be taking more responsibility for the content of their own website but they refuse to do so. Disclaimers are a low-quality signal, and unless there are thousands of contradictory positive signals (which there are not, for this domain) then this is how this will be viewed

            5.) The site has no value-add for end-users, or unique value-proposition. People can find more in-depth reviews from product critics they trust, or shallow yet more numerous reviews from review aggregators like Trust Pilot. Either way, they would be on a better site with a better value-proposition for the end user. Why would Google rank this site?

            6.) Site claims to be a review site, yet does not make good usage of review schema and star-ratings for prettier SERPs. Seems more like a blog with aspirations to be a review site, which didn't quite make it. The site marks up the supposed 'reviews' with BlogPosting schema, not with review schema

            7.) Content is dry with poor layout and feels boring. In most reviews no numerical evaluation is made, no star ratings are given. There's no point at which the author accepts: "I am a reviewer now, I must give an opinion, I must give something useful to the user which they could use at a glance". The unwillingness to take responsibility for giving an opinion, combined with the disclaimer which reinforces the author's 'shunning' of their own content (are they worried their own content is bad? Why are they so careful not to give or take responsibility for opinions? The images all look like stock images, are these fake reviews? Right now it feels like yes they are)

            8.) It feels as if this site has bee made 'for the sake of' SEO. That's not the kind of site Google wants to rank


            ... so as you can see, even if you tackle your poor backlinks, this site doesn't really have much hope of ranking well on Google. Google is ultimately looking for trust and a value proposition. Over the materials which Google already has indexed on their first page of results for the reviewed products, the pages on this site don't really add anything. In addition the domain is giving off multiple off-page AND on-page mistrust signals, which will really stand against in the rankings

            In this case I think you'd better head all the way back to the drawing board

            Look at this video in which Miley from Google (think she's an ex-Googler now) outlines the #1 common SEO mistake as 'working without a value proposition':

            • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AmRg3p79pM

            You only need to watch her outline issue #1, the rest of the video isn't that relevant to you

            Also watch Moz's video on how unique content isn't good enough to rank any more:

            https://moz.com/blog/why-good-unique-content-needs-to-die-whiteboard-friday

            ... and how you should craft 10x content to replace the prior 'plague' of 'good unique content':

            https://moz.com/blog/how-to-create-10x-content-whiteboard-friday

            After watching these videos, you should begin to understand why what you're doing isn't working and why it won't work

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 7
            • jasongmcmahon
              jasongmcmahon last edited by

              Hi there,

              It can take takes as little as 48 hours for google to take of a disavow file. after which it can still take weeks even months until google re-crawls the disavowed links and takes the disavow them into account.

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
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