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Are you sure your website’s SEO profile is healthy enough to dodge Google spam related penalties?
Many website owners like you think so. But lurking spam sources either within your site’s shadows or pointing to it from the outside can get you in the bad books of Google in no time.
But don’t panic. There’s always a way out. Enter spam scores.
Understanding your website’s spam score can help unlock a healthier SEO profile so that you don’t have to face Google’s wrath.
In this write-up, we’ll talk about spam scores, how they influence your website’s health and discover effective strategies to reduce them.
What is Spam Score?
Imagine running a health check for your website. Checking the spam score is one of the simplest ways of doing it.
Spam Score is an SEO metric that helps evaluate the likelihood of your website being penalized by search engines like Google based on the spammy practices involved in optimizing it, especially building low-quality, toxic backlinks.
No matter if you implement such black hat tactics intentionally or unintentionally, Google will penalize your site if it finds that you are violating its guidelines or tricking its algorithms to get your site ranked higher by unfair means.
Keeping an eye on your website’s spam score gives you a bigger picture of how near or away you are from falling prey to search engine penalties and allows you to maintain a healthy SEO profile.
A low spam score indicates reliability and trustworthiness, while a high score suggests potential penalties from practices like building irrelevant backlinks, creating low-quality content, keyword stuffing and more.
However, it is important to note that these spam ratings generated by third-party tools like Moz and Semrush and are NOT from Google themselves.
Google has time and again reiterated that it does not consider the third party metrics such as spam score while ranking a page. However, the recent API leaks suggest that Google does have their own methods to assess a website’s reputation.
NSR (Normalized Spam Ratio) is a term used in Google’s internal documentation to refer to a site-level signal that indicates if a website has dubious quality and trustworthiness signals.
The document also has a section that discusses Spamrank, a system that measures the likelihood of a website getting links from known spammers.
While Google vehemently disavows the use of third-party spam score data, its internal system does try to evaluate sites based on these proprietary parameters mentioned above.
Each spam score checker tool measures spam scores differently. While Moz measures spam scores on a scale of 1 to 100, Semrush shows it on a scale of low, medium and high.
Importance of Spam Score for SEO
Though we know spam score doesn’t directly impact a website’s ranking, maintaining a low spam score is good SEO practice.
Let me show you how high spam scores can be bad for your website.
Impacts Search Engine Rankings
A high spam score often signals the use of excessive spammy SEO tactics, from toxic backlinks to low-quality, unoptimized content.
If the third-party tools identify the site as spammy, Google’s more sophisticated Spam detection systems may trace it sooner or later.
This can reduce your online visibility for relevant searches in your niche and make it difficult for your potential customers to find you. As a result, your page’s incoming organic traffic will decline.
Affects Trustworthiness
A high spam score means your site is distracted from adhering to SEO best practices. This translates into offering a poor user experience and damages your site’s credibility in the eyes of the search engine.
Triggers Penalties
As I mentioned above, high spam scores can indicate that you are not following Google’s guidelines properly.
From that standpoint, a high spam score can be a red flag, signaling algorithmic penalties or manual actions just around the corner. In worst cases, ignoring such high toxicity can lead to removing your website from SERPs.
How to Check Your Spam Score
Let me show you how you can check your website’s spam score using Moz.
Log in to Moz and navigate to “Spam Score” under the Link Research section.
Enter your page URL and click the Analyze button.
You will see the spam score displayed as below.
According to Moz, a spam score of 1 to 30% signals low spam, 31 to 60% indicates medium spam and 61 to 100% denotes high spam.
Key Factors Influencing Spam Score
Here’s a look at the major factors that determine if a website has high spam. Since this blog addresses spam score as a holistic SEO metric rather than link-specific, I have included a few SEO factors that determine if a website has a higher spam score.
Link Quality
Your link quality matters.
With multiple spam policy updates that overlapped with the March 2024 Core update and the June 2024 Spam Update, Google has enhanced RankBrain, its AI-based spam prevention system, to target unnatural links and curb different types of spammy practices.
Given the scenario, low-quality backlinks from sources like irrelevant websites, websites penalized by Google, link farms or PBNs can lead to higher spam scores for your website.
Link Velocity
Link velocity refers to the rate at which your website gains new backlinks.
An unnatural spike in the number of new backlinks, for example, 200 backlinks at once, can signal potential manipulative link building practices and lead to Google eyeing your site with suspicion.
Such unnatural link velocity can trigger spam alerts, resulting in higher chances of risk for you, especially if your website is relatively new.
Toxic Links
Toxic backlinks such as links from link farms, hidden or embedded links, low-quality directory links and spammy forum links are likely to increase your website’s toxicity and accelerate your spam score.
These toxic backlink building practices can result in fetching search engine penalties.
Anchor Text Overuse
Anchor text overuse occurs when you repeatedly use the same keyword-rich anchor text in your backlinks.
This can appear unnatural to search engines and contribute to a higher spam score while making your site susceptible to manual actions from Google.
Site Content Quality
Google aims to provide users with helpful and relevant information that adds value to them.
If your website’s content doesn’t meet these standards, it can negatively impact its credibility and SEO performance.
Low-quality content, including irrelevant and duplicate content pieces on your website, can increase your spam score.
Domain Age and Authority
Newer domains often lack the trust and authority that older, established domains have built over time.
This can open doors to a higher domain spam score, especially if you resort to black hat link building or low-quality content production backed by poor research for your new website.
On-Page SEO Practices
Unoptimized websites typically exhibit poor SEO performance. However, if you do SEO the wrong way, again, you may end up bringing no SEO benefits to your website.
Such over-optimization practices, including keyword stuffing, inappropriate anchor text usage for internal link building and hidden content and backlinks, can make your SEO efforts go in vain and spike up your spam score.
Technical SEO Issues
If you are ignoring technical SEO, you are making a huge compromise on your website’s health.
Technical SEO problems, including hacks, malwares, broken links, improper redirects, redirect chains, and slow page loading, are other potential reasons for an increased spam score.
How to Reduce Spam Score
Now that you know what contributes to an increased spam score, let’s explore the ways to bring it down. Here you go.
Improve Link Quality
Acquiring high-quality backlinks from trusted high-authority websites is essential for lowering your spam score and boosting your SEO.
So, how do you do it?
Produce high-quality, informative content that engages your users and naturally attracts backlinks.
Consider writing guest posts for influential blogs in your niche and leverage those posts to create contextual backlinks to your site. Ensure that your content is valuable and relevant to the audience of the host site.
Also, build relationships with influencers and thought leaders in your industry to gain relevant backlink opportunities with minimal effort.
Make sure you maintain a natural link profile at all times.
Monitor Link Velocity
As I mentioned earlier, sudden spikes in link acquisition can prompt Google to grow suspicious about your site. That’s why maintaining a steady and natural link building pace is important.
Try to maintain a consistent link acquisition rate over time.
Prioritize earning high-quality links even if it takes time because these links can bolster sustainable SEO growth for your website and are completely worth the wait.
Remove Spammy Backlinks
If you find toxic backlinks pointing to your site, you can have them removed by getting in touch with corresponding webmasters or using the disavow tool if you want.
Alternatively, you can just IGNORE those spammy links. Yes. You read it right.
Google recommends ignoring spammy backlinks.
Answering a question about toxic backlinks in a recent Google SEO office hours podcast, Google’s Gary Illyes says, “I’d ignore those links.”
He explains, “Generally Google is really, REALLY good at ignoring links that are irrelevant to the site they’re pointing at. If you feel like it, you can always disavow those “toxic” links, or file a spam report.”
Diversify Anchor Text
Using different target keywords as anchor texts to build backlinks helps maintain a natural link profile and reduces the risk of over-optimization.
Incorporate different variants of your primary keywords as anchor texts in your content.
Alternatively, you can consider using a combination of generic phrases, long-tail keywords and branded and non-branded search terms as your anchor texts based on relevance.
Suppose “running shoes” is your focus keyword. You can use different variants of it, such as running shoes for women, running shoes for men, Nike running shoes or how to choose the best running shoes, as your anchor text.
Make sure the anchor text is always relevant to your page, where the user gets redirected when they click on the backlink.
Enhance Content Quality
High-quality content is a cornerstone of good SEO and helps reduce your spam score.
Ensure your content is original and crafted in such a way that it effectively addresses the pain points faced by your audience. This way, the readers will find your content useful.
This will bolster your site’s user engagement metrics and boost conversions.
Refresh your content and make necessary improvements to ensure it remains valuable and accurate. This can help maintain your site’s credibility and SEO performance.
Fix Technical Issues
As I mentioned earlier, technical SEO issues, from broken links to slow page loading, can make way for a higher spam score.
Fixing the potential technical bugs and maintaining a well-organized site structure allows Google to crawl and index your site more efficiently.
Leverage easy navigation, user-friendly URL structures and proper internal linking to improve your site’s SEO and cut down spam signals.
Improve Domain Authority
Improving your domain authority takes time, but it is worth it. It requires robust, long-term SEO strategies.
Again, content and backlinks are key.
Create and publish high-quality, user-engaging content on a regular basis, not just to attract natural backlinks but also to position yourself as an industry expert. Gain backlinks from reputable and relevant websites to demonstrate your credibility and trustworthiness.
All these will pass strong E-E-A-T signals to Google, which will help improve your domain authority.
Additionally, you can encourage positive reviews to boost user engagement and build a strong online presence to enhance your domain authority.
Avoid Black Hat SEO Techniques
Unethical shortcuts only bring short-lived success, and that too, at the cost of penalties and manual actions from Google. This can potentially kick off your site deep down in the SERPs.
With many latest additions to its spam policies, including site reputation abuse and expired domain abuse, Google has once again emphasized on its disapproval for unfair practices for sites to climb up the SERP ladder.
Do not indulge in link spam or content-based spam in any form. Make sure you focus on ethical SEO practices like creating user-centric content, earning powerful backlinks and optimizing your site for a smooth user experience. These practices ensure long-term success and prevent your site from falling prey to penalties.
Stay Updated with SEO Trends
SEO is constantly evolving. That said, staying updated with the latest SEO trends and search engine algorithm changes is more than important.
Keep a constant eye on everything SEO, from leading SEO blogs and forums to industry conferences and webinars, to keep up with the upcoming trends.
This way, you can quickly adapt to changes and keep your spam score at bay, while ensuring that your SEO strategies remain effective.
Despite being generated by third-party SEO tools, spam scores help webmasters stay vigilant about potential SEO red flags. This way, you can take proactive measures to prevent search engine penalties, which may affect your site’s SERP positions drastically.
Weeding out spammy links and content connected to your website can help you establish a strong online presence and attract more traffic organically.
FAQ’s
A spam score is an SEO metric that assesses how likely it is for a website to be penalized by search engines like Google for using spammy practices or violating their guidelines.
You can find your website’s spam score using spam score checker tools online. We recommend using trusted tools like Moz and Semrush to make informed decisions.
A spam score of less than 30% on Moz is considered the minimum spam score. Semrush shows spam scores (or toxicity scores) on a color-stripped scale of low, medium and high.
Yes. Avoiding building spammy links and creating low-quality content are the best ways to reduce your spam score.
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1 Comment
Hello! I found your article very informative and read it with great interest. Thank you especially for the advice regarding how to decrease the spam score, that’s what I was looking for! Congratulations on the blog and regards!