Spam Score is a metric from the SEO (search engine optimization) tool company Moz, not from Google. Moz’s Spam Score estimates the percentage of sites with features similar to yours that Google has penalized or banned. A higher percentage means your site shares more traits with penalized sites, but a high score does not prove your site is spam.
Moz bases the number on 27 signals about your site itself that its machine learning model found are common among penalized sites. Spam Score is not calculated from the Spam Scores of the sites that link to you. Google does not use Moz’s Spam Score to rank pages.
Moz updates Spam Score quarterly, and your score changes only when Moz detects changes to those 27 signals. Let’s talk more about what spam score is and how to go about improving yours.
How do I find my Spam Score?
You find your Spam Score in Moz’s tools, such as Moz Link Explorer, not in Google Search Console.
To check your domain’s Spam Score:
- Open Moz Link Explorer and sign in to your Moz account.
- Enter your domain name in the search box.
- Find Spam Score in the domain overview, shown as a percentage.
Google Search Console does not show a Spam Score. To see whether Google itself has flagged your site for spam, check the Manual Actions report in Search Console. A manual action means a human reviewer at Google decided some of your pages break its spam policies, and those pages can drop out of search results.
What does Google count as spam?
Google counts as spam any practice meant to trick its search rankings instead of helping searchers, and it lists those practices in its spam policies.
Spam includes black hat SEO techniques (tactics that break search engine rules), buying or selling links for ranking purposes, and pages built to rank rather than to help the people who land on them.
Cybercriminals often use spam practices to drive traffic to malicious sites. Common spam practices include:
- No Value Keywords: Keyword stuffing means filling titles, meta descriptions, URLs and page text with keywords to manipulate rankings, without adding real value for the people searching. For example, if someone wanted to purchase a new digital TV online, they might put the word ‘tv’ in their web page’s title instead of the actual product name.
- Hidden Text: Hidden text means placing words or links on a page that human visitors can’t see, such as white text on a white background or text hidden behind images, purely to manipulate search engines. Here is an example of hidden links:
(Image Credit: Search Engine Genie)
- Link Schemes: Link schemes are linking tactics that artificially inflate a website’s ranking, such as buying links or creating many low-value pages whose only job is to link to one site. Site owners sometimes join link schemes on purpose and sometimes by accident, for example by hiring a cheap link-building service.
Google finds spam with automated systems and, when needed, human reviewers. According to Google’s spam policies, sites that break those policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all, and a human review can lead to a manual action against the site.
Why does my Spam Score go up?
Your Spam Score goes up when Moz detects changes to your site that match more of the 27 signals it sees on penalized sites.
A rising Spam Score combined with falling rankings over time is worth investigating, because your site may be picking up the same traits as sites Google has penalized. However, it’s crucial to note that Google doesn’t always give warnings before taking action against websites.
The following factors may contribute to increasing your spam score:
- Using black hat SEO and other deceptive tactics
- Making money off of links from bad websites
- Buying links, which Google’s spam policies prohibit
- Writing low quality, irrelavent content
- Publishing misleading or inaccurate information
- Creating duplicate content
- Placing content on multiple websites
If you’re concerned about receiving a penalty, a site monitoring tool like diib can check your site and give you recommendations for fixing the problems behind a high Spam Score.
How can I fix my Spam Score?
You fix your Spam Score by finding what raised it, such as low-quality content or other spam-like traits on your site, and fixing that first.
The right fix depends on what caused the increase, and we only recommend taking specific actions if you’ve been notified explicitly that certain activities triggered a penalty.
Some of the most common causes of an increased spam score are:
- Using black hat SEO or other deceptive tactics to boost your listing.
- Purchasing links from spammers, link farms, or sites with a high propensity for Spam.
- Trying to fool Google into thinking that your site has more authority than it has.
- Not providing enough useful information on your pages to meet Google’s standards.
- Failing to follow best practices regarding copyright, trademark, privacy, and safety.
How do I lower my Spam Score?
You lower your Spam Score by cleaning up the problems Moz associates with penalized sites, such as copied or thin content and technical errors on your own site. Cleaning up or disavowing backlinks won’t change it, because Moz doesn’t calculate Spam Score from the sites linking to you and can’t see links you disavow in Google.
A high Spam Score doesn’t necessarily mean that your site contains lots of spam, but a high score could indicate that some things need to be fixed with your site, like broken links, poor content or bad coding. If you’re interested in fixing those problems, check out our guide on Fixing Broken Links.
(Image Credit: Kinsta)
Here are some other ways to lower your spam score:
Remove All Duplicate Content on Your Site
Copying content from another site without giving credit is plagiarism, and Google’s spam policies treat scraped content (content copied from other sites with little or no added value) as spam.
Find and remove identical content on your site using a tool like Copyscape.
Also, pay attention to copyright infringement. Copying someone else’s work by accident is easy. If you think you’ve copied something, contact the creator or publisher first so you stay on the right side of copyright law.
Then remove anything you don’t have the rights to use, like images copied from other sites.
Improve Your Site’s SEO
Use keywords in the titles and descriptions of your pages, and use them naturally in your article text. Don’t stuff them in, because Google’s spam policies count keyword stuffing as spam.
Use relevant meta tags, URLs, and callouts in your posts. Meta tags, URLs and callouts help search engines learn more about what your page is about.
Ensure that your navigation menus point to valuable pages. Don’t just throw random links in there. And make sure that your menu items are grouped logically.
Add New Content Regularly
Include new blog posts every week. Create content that answers questions that users are searching for. Write helpful articles on topics that interest your audience.
Keep Track Of Your Statistics
See how many people visit your site and how long they spend there. Also, note where they come from. With diib’s user dashboard, you can easily see your metrics across multiple platforms and you’ll be given customized alerts for improvement. For instance:
(Image Credit: SEO Tools Finder)
Check Your Bounce Rate
In Google Analytics 4 (GA4), bounce rate is the percentage of sessions that were not engaged. An engaged session lasts longer than 10 seconds, has a key event, or has 2 or more page or screen views. A high bounce rate means you have work to do including eliminating anything that turns people away.
Fix errors that may have caused Google to mark your site as Spam. Check any technical errors reporting on your site settings page. Look for 404 issues, broken links, redirects, and internal linking errors.
Update Your Site Information
The last step in setting up your site is telling Google exactly what business you run. You can tell Google by adding new categories, changing existing ones, adding more information to your About Us section, and updating other sections if necessary.
Get Support
An excellent online reputation isn’t just about ensuring that your site works well; it also includes building relationships with customers and other sites. So, answer customers quickly and build real relationships with other sites in your industry.
What does it mean if my site’s Spam Score isn’t available?
A missing Spam Score usually means Moz hasn’t collected enough data about your site to score it yet.
Unavailable Spam Score data can happen for various reasons. Your site may be new, or few other sites may link to it, so Moz has little to measure. Moz may also not have recrawled your site yet.
Spam Score comes only from Moz. Google does not publish a Spam Score, so a different tool that shows a “spam score” is either using Moz’s data or its own separate metric, and the numbers won’t match.
If the technical side feels like too much, consider hiring a professional to handle it.
How do I manage spam on my website?
You manage spam on your website by blocking it before it gets in, with tools like IP blocking, CAPTCHAs and comment filters.
Managing Spam is easy once you figure out which spam blockers are most appropriate for your site. Here are some suggestions to help you decide:
Block IP Addresses
IP address filtering is one of the best ways to protect yourself against unwanted visitors. IP addresses are unique numbers for each device connected to the Internet. When a person visits your site, their browser uses those numbers to determine whether or not they can view your pages. Using filters allows you to block specific IP ranges from accessing your site.
A spammer or malicious visitor can’t reach your site from a blocked IP address. Blocking IP addresses helps minimize the amount of malicious activity happening on your site.
Use Robots.Txt File
A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs they can access on your site, mainly so crawlers don’t overload your server. Google says robots.txt is not a way to keep a page out of Google, and some crawlers ignore it, so robots.txt won’t stop spam bots on its own.
Website owners often use robots.txt to stop search engines from crawling certain parts of their site, such as admin pages. To keep a page out of search results, use a noindex tag or password protection instead.
(Image Credit: Semrush)
Use CAPTCHA
CAPTCHAs (Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart) are designed to ensure automated bots think twice before submitting forms. CAPTCHAs are puzzles that require users to type letters or words into boxes. While the human brain is swift at solving these puzzles, computers are not. As a result, bots typically take longer than humans to solve captchas.
While there are several variations of CAPTCHAs, most involve making users click buttons in response to questions or visual stimuli. Some are very simple, like clicking an image that looks like a button when viewed through the camera lens on a smartphone or tablet. Other CAPTCHA systems may ask users to identify items hidden within images, read a list of random digits, etc.
Sitemap
A sitemap lists the URLs for every page on your site. A good sitemap keeps track of any and all new content on your site and makes it easier for search engines to crawl your site efficiently.
Consider adding a sitemap to all of your pages. An XML Sitemaps tool will automatically generate a sitemap based on everything you’ve published on your site. A sitemap helps search engines find your pages and changes (content updates, redirections, etc.) sooner, though Google says a sitemap doesn’t guarantee every URL in it will be crawled and indexed.
Learn more about how to create XML Sitemaps here.
Remove Old Links
Spammers often link to pages that no longer exist to make readers believe the links lead somewhere. Lots of links pointing to dead pages on your site can be a sign of bot activity. To clean up dead pages in Google:
- Log in to Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).
- Open the Pages report to see which URLs return a 404 (Not Found) error.
- Fix or redirect the pages you still need. For pages that are gone for good, make sure your server returns a 404 or 410 (Gone) status code.
- If you need a URL hidden from Google quickly, use the Removals tool. A removal request lasts only about six months, so it doesn’t replace fixing the page.
(Image Credit: AllUsefullInfo)
What effect does Spam Score have on SEO?
Spam Score has no direct effect on your Google rankings, because Google doesn’t use Moz’s metric, but a high score is a warning that your site shares traits with sites Google has penalized.
The spammy practices behind a high Spam Score, such as bad links and copied content, are what can hurt your rankings. To lower your risk of a Google penalty:
- Have a clean, well-maintained website free of broken links
- Make sure Google can find all the pages on your site
- Keep the homepage fresh, optimized and updated
- Avoid creating any duplicate copies of the same page
- Consider removing spammy links.
Monitoring tools can help you keep up with that list. diib tracks your backlinks, broken pages and technical SEO, and sends alerts with plain-English steps for fixing the problems it finds.
How do I prevent spam on my site?
You prevent comment spam on your site with a spam filter like Akismet and by tightening your comment moderation settings.
There are two main ways to stop spammers from using your website to further their goals. The first option is to use a service called Akismet, which checks the comments on your site for spam before they appear. The second method is to review your comment moderation settings manually.
Akismet
Akismet is one of the best-known anti-spam services for WordPress. Akismet checks comments as they come in and filters out the ones that look like spam, so they don’t show up on your blog.
Akismet allows you to install their plugin directly onto your WordPress site. You don’t need to worry about installing an external application. With the plugin installed, your comments will automatically be checked for spam, and suspected spam is kept off your pages.
Here’s how it works:
When someone leaves a comment on your blog, Akismet checks it. Comments flagged as spam go to the spam folder in your WordPress dashboard, where you can review them and mark any mistakes as “not spam.”
You can also delete spam comments from that folder for good.
Manual Review
Another way to detect spam comments is to monitor your comment moderation settings. All comments submitted through your site’s user interface will pass through your moderation queue, where you’ll have the chance to approve or reject them.
Your Moderation Settings determine what types of comments you allow on your site. For example, you may decide to block anonymous users and require people attempting to leave a comment to register first.
Once again, you can change your moderation settings on your web dashboard, but the easiest approach is to let Akismet handle most of the filtering for you.
Disable Comments
You can disable comments altogether, which means anyone who tries to post a comment will see an error message when they try to do so. But spammers who want to post malicious comments will continue.
Disabling comments prevents other commenters from leaving replies unless they’re logged into your account and approved by you (which would probably mean they were human).
IP Addresses
The most popular way to protect against Spam is to block IP addresses known to be used by spammers. You can often block those IP addresses through your content delivery network (CDN), a network of servers that delivers your site’s files from locations around the world.
A CDN helps speed up sites by delivering static resources such as images and movies closer to your visitors. A CDN does this by caching the files on servers located near your visitors.
To block IP addresses with your host or CDN:
- Log in to your web hosting or CDN account.
- Open the security or firewall settings.
- Add the IP addresses or IP ranges you want to block, then save.
Menus differ between providers, so check your host’s or CDN’s documentation for the exact steps.
WordPress Security Scanner
Akismet filters spam but doesn’t scan your site for security problems. For that, add a separate WordPress security plugin that checks your site for vulnerabilities, and run its scans regularly.
(Image Credit: Understrap)
To add a plugin, go to Plugins and then Add New in your WordPress dashboard, search for the plugin, and click Install and then Activate. The plugin will then appear in your list of installed plugins.
After activating the plugin, open its settings to choose how often it scans and whether it emails you about potential issues.
How can diib help lower my Spam Score?
diib monitors your backlinks, blacklist status and technical SEO, so you can spot and fix the problems that raise your spam risk.
Spam is an issue for any business with a website. At diib, we understand the impact that spam problems can have on your small business traffic. We give you plain-English insights into your website’s health, so you know what to fix to cut your spam risk and grow your traffic. Here are a few of our customized features you’re sure to appreciate:
- Keyword, backlink, and indexing monitoring and tracking tools
- Blacklist monitoring and objectives for repair
- Core Web Vitals monitoring
- Bounce rate monitoring and repair
- Facebook and Instagram Insights and YouTube video performance
- Broken pages where you have backlinks (404 checker)
- Technical SEO monitoring
Click here for your free 60-second website scan. diib members also get diibLive office hours with our growth experts.
