Spamscore

What is Spam Score?

The spam score is a metric that predicts how likely a webpage is to be penalized for engaging in manipulative and spammy SEO techniques. It is not used or reported by Google and has zero effects on your search engine rankings.

Instead, individual search engine optimization (SEO) tools measure and report the spam score. These tools review metrics and signals from the individual URLs pointing to specific URLs on your site. They then evaluate and use them to calculate a spam score for that particular URL.

Users of these SEO tools use the spam score to determine the quality of the links pointing to their URLs. This allows them to analyze their backlinks and identify high-risk URLs that may cause Google to issue a manual action penalty against their site.

Importance of the Spam Score

Your spam score does not affect your search engine rankings. Instead, third-party tools use it to evaluate the spaminess of the inbound links that point to your site. 

This is important because the inbound links that point to your site do not have the same weight. Some links are more valuable and pass more link gelijkheid en PageRank than others. Some links can also harm your rankings and cause Google to issue a manual action penalty against you. 

However, bloggers do not have access to Google’s search algorithm. So, they do not know which links improve or hurt their rankings. This is why these SEO tools created the spam score metric to evaluate how spammy a link is and give bloggers an idea of how their inbound links impact their sites. 

That said, while some SEO tools like Moz explicitly call the spam score metric the “spam score,” others give it other names. For example, Semrush reports it as toxic backlinks and potential link networks, which it reports as part of your backlink audit.

How SEO Tools Evaluate Your Spam Score

SEO tools typically calculate your spam score by analyzing multiple metrics from sites linking to you. Moz, for instance, evaluates 27 signals from your inbound links and compares them against patterns it observed on sites that Google has penalized. These signals include:

1. Low amount of webpages on the site
2. The presence of numbers in the URL
3. Absence of Google Font API on the site
4. Absence of Google tag manager on the site
5. Absence of Doubleclick ad tag on the site
6. Absence of a phone number on the site 
7. Absence of a link to your LinkedIn page
8. Absence of an email address on the site
9. Usage of HTTP in plaats van HTTPS
10. Inclusion of meta keywords on the site
11. Usage of excessively long meta keywords
12. Low amounts of visitors to the site
13. Presence of a non-local rel=canoniek label
14. Usage of excessively long or short title tags (meta title)
15. Usage of overly long or short meta descriptions
16. Absence of a favicon on the site
17. Absence of the Facebook Pixel ad tracking code 
18. The presence of excessively large or small inbound links
19. The presence of excessively large or small outbound links
20. Abnormal ratio of content and external links on the site
21. Presence of sequential vowels or consonants in the domain name
22. Usage of a subdomain and domain name length common with spam sites
23. The presence of multiple hyphens in the domain name
24. Excessively long or short URL paths
25. Presence of poison keywords in the URL
26. The presence of anchor texts with a high cost per click 
27. Usage of top-level domains commonly used by spam sites (For example, .download, .stream, and .biz)

Moz reviews these signals and uses them to calculate the spam score for the URL. However, Moz does not reveal the weights of the individual signals. But as usual, we should expect that some signals add to the spam score while others subtract from it. 

The spam score reported in Moz goes from 1 to 100%. 

• A score between 1 and 30% is considered low
• A score between 31 and 60% is considered medium
• A score between 61 and 100% is considered high

Overall, you want to keep your spam score low. However, Moz has clarified that a high spam score does not mean your site contains spam. Instead, it only indicates that the linking site has multiple features in common with spammy sites that have been penalized by Google.