Like cancer is to body cells, so are spam backlinks to SEO. A single spam backlink has little harm, but when multiple spread to your website, you are up for disastrous ranking results.

Spam links are one of the leading causes of Google ranking drops, deindexing, and penalties, hence why you must avoid them at all costs. Fortunately, website spam score is a ranking system that can help keep backlink spam at bay.

Below is more about website spam score, how it works, how to utilize it to ensure that spam isn’t sabotaging your SEO efforts and what a high website spam score vs. a low website spam score means to your site.

Website Spam Score Definition

A website spam score is a grading system developed in 2015 by Moz, an SEO software and data company, that forecasts the likelihood of subdomain spam on a site. It is comprised of 17 spam flags, each corresponding to a specific spam indicator determined by the company’s research team. According to Moz’s indexing, while finding your website’s spam score, expect it to lie between 0-17.

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Ways to Use Your Website Spam Score

Now that you know what a website spam score is, the question is, what do you do with it?

Identifying a Spammy Subdomain

You can use your website spam score to establish if your subdomain is spammy. If it happens, you should quickly identify and correct any spam signals. A spammy subdomain could prevent your site from ranking well in search engines.

Establishing Quality Backlinks

You can also use your website spam score to see whether or not the backlinks leading to your website are high quality. SEO amateurs may assume that having lots of backlinks is preferable, but SEO experts agree, quality beats quantity. You want to ensure that the sites linking to yours are high authority pages trusted by search engines.

Increasingly, online content creators, bloggers, digital marketers, and media-savvy internet enterprises verify the website spam scores of sites they are considering partnering or collaborating with before actively pursuing that backlink through marketing and collaboration campaigns.

Admittedly, as a business, you don’t want spammy websites connecting to your website. Spammy backinks could affect your platform’s backlink portfolio and, as a result, your organic exposure if search engines like google algorithmically penalize your site.

Even as a writer, you wouldn’t want your work linked to fishy sites as it would jeopardize your credibility.

Importance of Website Spam Score for SEO

Calculating a high or low website spam score is essential as it gives you two critical pieces of information.

• How spammy do your own website’s subdomains appear?
• How spammy are the subdomains of backlinks to your website perceived to be?

Remember, high and low website spam scores affect your SEO ranking differently. Regarding your link profile, having many careless or fishy backlinks can cause more harm than good.

Your website spam score offers a strong foundation for determining the authenticity and quality of a single website. You could avoid being penalized by Google this way and continue protecting your rankings on search engines.

How to Check a Site’s Website Spam Score

How do you find a High website spam score vs. a low website spam score? This is a frequent question we field here are Diib and one you have likely asked yourself. The easiest part is actually finding your website’s website spam score. On Moz’s Open Site Explorer, enter your website’s URL, and it will generate a small report for you.

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You can obtain your website’s home page website spam score and the ratings for individual pages on your website.

Website Spam Score Calculator

Finding the website spam score of a subdomain is relatively straightforward. Moz’s crawler is the website spam score calculator that searches and analyzes subdomains for 17 spam flags.

A number is added to the subdomain’s website spam score for each spam flag it finds. The ultimate website spam score is calculated by adding all the specific spam flags for a subdomain, giving a total of 0-17. After the addition, the higher the website spam score, the more likely the subdomain is to be spam.

Almost every website on the internet has at least one spam warning in the website spam score calculator. However, this does not guarantee that Google will consider them spam. As mentioned earlier, a website spam score is cumulative.

According to the website spam score calculator, the more spam flags a site has, the more likely it is to be considered spam by Google and other search engines.

Website Spam Score’s 17 Spam Flags

What goes into finding my website spam score? You probably wonder.

The following is a comprehensive list of the 17 recognized website spam score factors, an explanation of their meaning, and some general recommendations for lowering your website spam score.

1. MozRank Score

In simplified terms, a low MozTrust Score results from a site with a shady-looking backlink profile that lacks referring links from sites considered credible, authoritative, or related to the site’s niche. As a result, the site appears untrustworthy.

Other reliable sources frequently reference authoritative websites through referring links; hence sites lacking them are seen as less trustworthy. Obtaining links from authoritative websites relevant to your site may help mitigate this issue.

2. Large Site which has Few Links

A website with a small number of links referring back to it might be read as a hint that the site provides substandard content or products. Nobody would bother linking to something they believed was garbage anyway!

As a website expands, so should its backlink profile. If the site’s content is strong, the backlink profile should grow naturally with it, but further outsourcing efforts may help, as sites only get the links they deserve if they actively work for them.

3. Low Site Link Diversity

It is crucial to have a high volume of links pointing to your site, and you should also ensure that the origins of those connections are diverse. Having a variety of different linking domains in the backlink profile is an essential factor in how search engines assess which sites are top in organic search terms.

A website with numerous connections from a few domains may quickly be defeated in rankings by a similar page with considerably fewer links from various reputable domains.

It is, therefore, critical to try to obtain your links from various sources, and most preferably reputable ones, rather than depending on many links from a few sites to link to you.

4. The Ratio of Dofollow to Nofollow Subdomains

These sites have many “dofollow links” compared to “nofollow links.” This indicator often implies that a site is not naturally acquiring links and instead employing bought link networks to produce followed backlinks to their website, indicating spam.

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It also shows why you should not remove any dofollow links from your backlink portfolio just because they’re not followed.

5. The Percentage of Dofollow Domains to Nofollow Ones

This website spam score criterion is a mix of site link diversification and the dofollow and nofollow links ratio. The ratio of backlinks in a site’s backlink profile should adhere to the same parameters as the total number of links.

It is the same as the dofollow to dofollow subdomains tatio, only now it pertains to root domains.

6. Small Percentage of Branded Links

The anchor text of a link, or the language surrounding the link, aids the link-to page’s ranking for the phrase within the anchor text. This needs to be used by link builders, who add specific keywords to link anchor text in bulk to rank their site for these keywords.

With this information, most search engines, such as Google, have tightened their belts. Pages with an unusually high number of referring links containing a specific term or phrase have been known to be demoted. As the SEO experts continue to deliberate on the appropriate least ratio of anchor text keywords, the agreement is that it should be between 1% and 10%.

However, this rule exempts branded text; you can use as much anchor text as you want on your page. Sites with naturally occurring link portfolios have a substantially higher quantity of sponsored anchor text connections.

If a site has, on the contrary, a higher amount of non-branded anchor text links, it’s a dead giveaway that it’s spam.

7. Thin Content

Thin content is defined as written material that provides little to no value to consumers. Some pages that fall into this category include duplicate material, automatically generated material, and scraped and affiliate content.

Google has indicated no minimum word count requirement for a website to perform in organic search results. However, it has been frequently noticed that sites with more substantial content rank higher than those with relatively sparse content.

Even pages with a high word count might be considered thin content if the information is meaningless and useless to viewers. Therefore, content should always be written to answer queries or deliver helpful information rather than meeting an arbitrary word count.

8. Site Mark-up Is Oddly Small

Site markup, which contains features such as CSS, Javascript, and Schema, is used to improve the user experience for visitors to the site.

Sites with minimal site markup, for example, elementary HTML-heavy pages with little formatting, poor structure, and graphical features, are usually good predictors of spam.

9. Many External Links

These are websites with an unusually high number of external links, and typically have few internal links.

Low-quality blog directories are a fantastic example of such types of sites. They can, however, be applied to any style of the site. Sites with a high number of external links are deemed spam by Google.

10. Few Internal Links

This spam indicator is frequently associated with a more significant number of external links. A high-quality site will typically have many internal links going to its own pages, and sites that lack this attribute are more likely to be spam.

If a website has few internal connections, it indicates that the site needs to be well-maintained, and user experience prioritized.

Moz does not trust websites that are unwilling to self-reference through internal linking. Suppose your website is marked for this type of website spam score. You need to compensate by adding suitable internal links where necessary.

11. Anchor Text-Heavy Page

Sites with an unusually high number of anchor text-heavy pages versus quality, in-depth content are a huge indicator of spam.

Again, low-quality blog directories are an excellent illustration of this form of spam.

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12. External Links in Navigation

These websites have many external links in their navigation system, such as footers and sidebars. Sites that use this technique are almost exclusively labeled as spam.

13. No Contact Info

Reputable websites will have a contact form on their website. There is often a contact information page or, at the absolute least, a section in the site’s footer or sidebar presenting contact information.

Google considers sites with no contact information to be spammy.

14. Few Pages Found

Assume Moz’s crawler needs help to recognize a large number of legitimate URLs on a web domain. In that case, it may be considered a placeholder website flagged as spam by Open Site Explorer because it does not consider such sites of any actual tangible value. As it simply states, a site with a few pages is deemed spam.

15. Top Level Domains Associated with Spam Domains

These are websites originating from top-level domains with a history of creating spam websites.

This website spam score signal should be relevant to web admins whose sites are hosted on a subdomain. If a top-level domain is a notorious source of spammy links, it reflects adversely on the subdomains hosted within it hence earning a website spam score flag.

16. Domain Name Length

Long domain names have typically been associated with spam. Most search engines prefer more concise URLs. It’s no different when it comes to a domain’s character count.

Open site explorer assigns domains with more characters than the average detected by their crawler a website spam score flag.

17. Domain Name Contains Numerals

Domain names that include numerals are a dead giveaway for spamming websites. Moz classifies as spam any web page containing a digit in the URL domain section and adds a spam point to the total. For example, a website with the domain name “cheaptickets4you.com” could be seen as spammy by Google.

A website spam score is a straightforward concept many professionals may overlook in their SEO approach. This can be bad because even little errors might negatively impact your total ranking.

It is among the performance indicators that people in the SEO industry worry about. However, if you’ve been following proper SEO techniques from the start, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

How to Reduce a Site’s Website Spam Score

After the Open Site Explorer assigns a website spam score to your chosen web page, clicking on it redirects you to another screen that briefly describes the various website spam score criteria. The criteria your tested URL has violated will be displayed in bold for you to see.

Lowering website spam scores requires you to determine which of the highlighted flags are actual causes for concern and work on improving your backlink and website profile appropriately. Some of these spam flags will be simpler to fix than others.

Working on a thin-page copy while lowering website spam scores should be easy. It can be fixed by writing original, engaging, and descriptive content on any highlighted pages. On the other hand, re-configuring your ratio of followed and no-follow links in the website’s backlink profile may be a massive task depending on the backlink profile size and knowledge levels.

With website spam score, prevention is better than cure, so ensure you uphold the best online activity in mind in your daily business operations. While this is easy, what happens to websites and enterprises that cannot afford to start over?

Sadly, there is no silver bullet for lowering the website spam score of websites with several flags, as each site will have its own set of problems and obstacles. Many strategies and hard work are usually required to get a site’s score down to reasonable levels.

Many website owners and enterprises only sometimes have this level of skill. Therefore, the best option in such circumstances is commissioning an SEO audit, which is detailed enough, from a digital marketing agency.

Diib® Digital: Your Website Spam Score Demystified!

After reading this post, we hope that you can make better use of website spam scores and improve your entire SEO approach. Diib® offers a birds eye view of your spam score and ways for improvement. Here are a few of the features of our User Dashboard you’re sure to love:

• Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
• Blacklist monitoring and objectives for repair
• User experience and mobile speed optimization
• Bounce rate monitoring and repair
• Social media integration and performance
• Broken pages where you have backlinks (404 checker)
• Technical SEO monitoring

Click here for your free 60 second site scan or simply call 800-303-3510 to speak to one of our growth experts.