Are you planning to take your website to another level with regulating spam scores?

Good!

Because websites are perhaps the most rapidly evolving across all of the internet kingdom.

And as every kingdom has its nightmares and evils, websites have spam scores and spammy links.

But no need to worry!

Below we have broken down an up-to-date guide on how you can save your website from those evil spam scores and make it prosperous again.

What is Moz and what does it have to do with Spam Scores?

Let's start with a basic question: what is a spam score?

A lot of websites are jeopardized by enormous amounts of spammy backlinks. Sometimes we assume that a pinch of backlinks will do the work and help us succeed. But unfortunately, it backfires most of the time.

That is why we have the golden rule- less is more.

Using extra backlinks helps not only to succeed but also to get you on a list of spammy websites.

And it is not the end:

Because of them, your website can be penalized or even deindexed by Google and have losses in SE rankings.

A spam score allows you to measure the spamminess of a website and regulate it whenever it gets too risky.

But how did it all start?

Let's dive deep:

In 2015 the Moz team announced their new spam score calculator and it was the start of a new era. A new metric system to measure troubled linking is named Moz Spam Score.

Long story, in short, a data scientist Dr Matt Peters started with 17 factors named "spam flags" and now it evolved into 27 flags. In which each "flag" indicated the likeliness of a site being banned or penalized by Google. It calculated the trouble on subdomains as it is the exact body part where parasites attach easily.

Now Moz spam score is the top-ranking tool to measure spam score on any website.

Piggybacking on the stats above allows you not only to check the spamminess of links pointing to your website but also to analyze how spammy your website is. Thus, spam score metrics have become more and more popular.
How to check the spam score of a website
Checking your website's spam score is not rocket science.

To start the examination, first, install the Moz bar. By the way, it is completely free.

Then look for the Moz toolbar icon next to the Google search bar. Click on it and create a brand new account.

It will show you the domain metrics of each website you have visited.

Well, now the show must go on…

The blog will perfectly guide you on everything you need to check the spam score of websites.

27 "Do" and "Don't" s

Let's shed some light on "spam flags" and how they are calculated.

When it was first released for SEO work, a spam score started from 0 and ended at 17, in which each flag indicated one spam only in a subdomain.

By the way, let's keep in mind that search engine recognizes a subdomain as a separate web address.

Now the spam score is calculated with 27 spam flags. This means it looks for 27 unique futures to judge the quality of your website.

Let's dig deeper:

Here we will break down the 27 factors that Moz looks over to calculate the spam score and take into consideration that in 2021 some of them have no meaning anymore. This means some of them are considerable and some are non-considerable today.

Non-considerable factors:

  • Names of a domain with numerals- It is best to choose the name of your website with the alphabet, but there are plenty of cool sites with numbers in its name that rank high.
  • The length of a domain name- It is quite okay to use long domain names. But if it is not necessary, try to keep it really short.
  • Doubleclicks
  • Meta Keywords usage
  • Rank of visit
  • Link to Linkedin
  • Icon of browser
  • Consonants or vowels in a domain name
  • But still, it is best to avoid repetitive vowels or consonants.
  • External Links
  • CPS anchor text
  • Number of found pages
  • It is because Google does not crawl websites.

Considerable factors:

Top-Level Domain correlated to your spam domain:

TLD like .pl., .cc., .fail.,.fit.,.tk.,.xyz. will create a bad impression.

  • Google Font API Present- if a website does not use fonts, it can be considered as a spammy site.
  • If you have a phone number
  • If you have Poison Words- if a website has been sprinkled with webspam topic words related to adult content, casino, gaming and etc. Google can rate it as a spammy site.
  • In case you have an email address
  • Rel canonical tags- if your site has nonlocal canonical tags it can be an alarm to Google that this website is a spammy one.
  • Length of Meta Description- Google cuts description at 155-160 characters so if your website or a linked site has more than 160 characters on description sites can be perceived as spammy ones.
  • Length of Meta Keywords-if your page has too many meta keyword tags then it can be marked as a spammy page. Or maybe a meta keyword is longer or shorter than it should be. Then it is a red flag as well.
  • Length of the Title Element
  • Length of the URL
  • Facebook Pixel- a Facebook pixel is a code that measures a user's actions and behavior on your website. Spammy sites never use Facebook Pixel. And if your website has a Facebook Pixel it will never be considered a spam site.
  • External Outlinks number
  • Domains Linked to number
  • Hyphens in Domain Name
  • Favicons- a high-quality website usually have a browser icon. If a website does not have a favicon it can be accepted as a spam site.
  • Contact Info- one of the signs of unreputable sites. A high-quality website should always have contact info.
  • Page number- a website with low page numbers will tend to be considered a spammy site. In contrast, a reputable website should have pages full of valuable content.

There is 3 level to measure spam score of a website:

  1. Low Spam Score- between 1%-30% is considered as a low spam score and it is colored with green. It is safe and no need to worry. Fun fact: every website on Google has at least one flag.
  2. Medium Spam Score- when your website shows 31%-60% it is a medium risk score.
  3. High Spam Score- above 61% to 100% is a high-risk score. It can reveal some dangerous sides of your website.


You can get access to a more detailed analysis where it shows the number of flags. And as Moz says "the relationship between the number of flags and percent of sites with those flags that we found Google had penalized or banned."
Vocabulary for Link Explorer
There is some terminology that can be useful for using Link Explorer while measuring Moz Spam Score:

Spam Score- the percentage of websites that have some common futures to sites which Google banned or penalized
Backlinks or inbound links- a link from another page to your own website
Date Crawled- it shows the date when you crawled your page for Spam Score assessment
PA (Page Authority)- it is a Moz metric to analyze how well the page ranks on Google.

Is it something I should worry about?
As we said above, every website on Google has at least one flag of Spam Scor. But it does not necessarily mean that your site or sites linking to your websites are spammy or risky.

In fact, the Moz Spam Score tool does help you to rate the riskiness and spamminess of your website but it does not provide you with all details. So we can not say that it is perfect.

However, if your website has shown over 20% in Moz Spam Score then it is a good idea to start looking for the problems. Google will not ban or penalize your website unless your score is over 50%. But you should not wait for that to come.

To solve the problem, you can start with Google Search Console reports. You can handle everything manually or just by using third-party tools. Use his tools to check if you have a problem with the algorithm. If you do, then try to solve it immediately.

What else?

Check if you had slow, broken, or missing pages on your websites and indexing issues. Maybe you should have a look at your Core Web Vitals reports as well.

All of these above affect your ranking and traffic.

By the way, there are a bunch of backlinks that do not matter both positively and negatively. Many folks have shared helpful thoughts on backlinks affecting spam scores, but there are some cases when people worry about backlinks more than they should.

What we actually mean by saying spammy backlink is a link leading to drug sellers, adult, or malicious sites.

Overall, a Moz Spam Score is a good friend for you to check on how well is your website and sites linked to your page are doing. With its help, your content will get the eyes it deserves