Your website’s search ranking and reputation can be affected by many factors. Professionals should be aware of whether their website has spam backlinks. Moz’s Spam Score will help you with this.
It is not enough to have many backlinks to build your SEO strategy. Not all backlinks are equal. Your site can suffer from too many spam backlinks.
- Google Penalties
- Search engine rankings are at risk.
- Getting deindexed (in severe cases)
These outcomes can be avoided by being aware of how search engines view your site and taking steps to correct any issues. A ‘Spam Score’ is a useful scoring metric.
This article will explain how spam score checker assesses your site, how it works, and how to combat low Spam Scores.
Spam Score: A Guide
Spam Score isn’t used in Google’s algorithm – Moz created it. This score is only useful for making informed SEO decisions.
Spam Score first analyzed websites against 17 spam signaling elements, which Moz called spam flags’. Moz added more spam signaling factors to the tool, referred to as ‘flags.’ We will discuss each of the 27 spam flags later.
A single score is the sum of all these flags. It indicates how likely a site will be penalized by Google. Google will predict that a site will be deemed spammy if it accumulates more flags.
These flags can be used to identify areas of concern, but they are intended to be viewed as whole. More than a single flag is required to cause concern. It is common for sites to have more than one flag.
SEO: Spam Score Is Important
A spam Score is vital because it gives you two crucial pieces of information:
- How spammy sub domains of your website can appear
- You can see how spammy sub domains of links pointing at your website are
Too many spammy backlinks can harm your link profile more than good.
How Does It Work?
Spam Score is easy to understand.
Spam Score operates only at the sub domain level, not for a root or full pages. Moz explains that spam links tend to be associated with sub domains.
This means that even though someone may have a high Spam Score, it only applies to their sub domains. This does not necessarily mean that their entire website is spammy.
The Spam Score is the sum of all these spam flags. It starts at 0 and ends at 17. The Spam Score is generally lower than the average. This is only sometimes, as we will see.
Here Are Some Interesting Facts About Spam Score
Surprisingly, each website has at least one spam warning. There is no reason to panic if you have more.
Search engines won’t automatically label your site spam if you have one flag. Otherwise, every page on the internet could be considered spam. This score only applies to sub domains. You shouldn’t panic if you see a Spam Score.
Because the Spam Score is cumulative, websites can only raise spam flags when they have more. A website with more spam flags than its sub domains will be considered spam.
Considerations When Looking At Spam Score
The spam Score does not consider sub domains in the pages being analyzed. You may wonder what a sub domain is.
You can get an idea of each type of domain by looking at the image below:
Spam Scores operate at the sub domain level. A page with high-risk sub domains does not necessarily indicate it is spam. A sub domain that is low in risk may also contain spammy pages.
Before you jump to conclusions based on a single score, it is important to examine both sub domains and individual pages.
A Spam Score of 8 on a sub domain doesn’t mean it is spam. However, a Spam Score of 2 does not necessarily indicate that the site has good content.
