Reduce Your Website’s Spam Score

The spam score of your website is the percentage of the spammy sites and the penalised sites that are linking to your website. If the spam score of your website is high then it will lead to many disadvantages.

A high spam score does not mean that your website is spam, the score only shows the percentage of the penalised website connected to your website. It is advisable to have a low spam score.

You can use the Moz toolbar to find out your website’s spam score. Spam Score is a metric developed by Moz and it is not used in Google algorithms.

If a website has a high number of backlinks and also a spam score then it may lead to negative SEO.

To reduce your spam score you will need to first find all the links pointing to your website by using tools like Moz, Ahrefs and more. These tools will give you a breakdown of the type of links pointing to your website.

Understanding the spam score

The spam score measures the likelihood that a website may be penalised for following spammy practices. Spammy practices can be building low-quality backlinks, thin content, duplicate content, keyword stuffing and suspicious SEO practices.

A score of 1 - 30 is considered to be a low spam score.

A score of 31 - 60 is considered a medium spam score.

A score of 61- 100 is considered to be a high spam score.

Analysing and identifying spam elements

A high spam score for your website indicates that you need to check the quality and relevance of your website. Though it does not mean that your website is spammy. You need to check the quality of the inbound links to your website and decide whether to remove them or not. To check your website you can hire Ethical SEO services.  

A high spam score on another website does not mean that it is spammy. It is only a signal for investigating its content and relevance. 

Using keywords too many times on a page or in anchor text to manipulate the ranking is called keyword stuffing. These keywords appear in an unnatural way or are out of context and are considered spam.  

When spammy content is added to a website by users through a channel intended for user content then it is called user-generated spam.

These are ways you can reduce your spam score:

1. A spammy score will help you to find out if your subdomain is spammy. If it is then you can rectify the spam. Having a spammy subdomain will not allow your website to be optimally listed in the search results.
2. You should check whether the backlinks pointing to your website are of high quality. Ensure that the website linking to yours are authority pages that the search engine has deemed as trustworthy.
3. Having spammy backlinks on your website can negatively impact your rankings. If you do not have control over spammy links, you can use Google’s Disavow tool to remove them.

Strategies to reduce spam score

You should do an audit of your backlink profile and find all the low-quality and spammy links that point to your website. Low-quality backlinks usually come from irrelevant websites, link farms and paid link schemes.

Spammy user-generated content comes from comments on blogs, spammy files uploaded, spammy hosting services and more. Moderation of user interaction on your website can help to control spam on your website. This will not allow the spammers to create content instantly which may be considered spam. You can publish an abuse policy and let your users know about it when they sign in. You can ask your users to report content that they consider spammy.   

You can use ‘CAPTCHA’ to protect against an unauthorised account entry. This will ensure that only users with the right password can access the account. It will also help to strengthen the security of sensitive accounts.

Factors that cause a spam score

The 19 different factors that cause a spam score are as follows:

1. Moz uses the metrics MozTrust & MozRank to determine how trustworthy a website is. If a website has a lower MozTrust score than the MozRank score then it is considered to be spammy.
2. If a website has a lot of pages and too few links then it indicates that the content of those pages has no real value. This tells the search engines that the pages are not worth linking to and the website could be considered spam.
3. If a site has a low link diversity then it is considered to be spammy. For example, if a site has 400 inbound links from 4 (few) linking domains then it has a low link diversity.
4. You should use a balanced ratio of the different types of anchor text so that your links are well optimised. You should develop backlinks for anchor text that you want to rank for.
5. You should create top-quality content which is in-depth and reliable. If your website is of low quality and has copied content then it will get marked as spam.
6. Websites with little markups like basic HTML, poor structure, pages with a little formatting and low-quality graphics are a sign of spam.
7. Internal links help the users stay longer on the website and offer a meaningful experience to them. Sites with a low number of internal links will get marked as spam.
8. If there are a lot of external links on the navigation menu then they can be mistaken to be pure advertising. Their spam score will be high.
9. All reputable sites have contact info and the visitors should be able to correspond with the administrator. If your website does not have contact info like email, physical address and social media profile then it may get marked as spam.
10. Sites that have too few pages are considered spam. You need not create hundreds of pages but your pages should have valuable and meaningful content.
11. Domain names should be short and simple. Too long, Domain names could be considered spammy.
12. You should keep yourdomain name limited to the English alphabet to avoid the risk of looking spammy. If your domain name has numerals then it may get flagged for Moz spam score.
13. When you use hyphens in the domain name it is difficult to pronounce and type out and also spammy sites tend to use multiple hyphens.
14. If a website is created on a top-level domain that has a reputation for creating spam sites then it will have a high spam score.
15. Google Tag Manager is a free tool provided by Google to help you manage your marketing tags. Spammy sites tend not to have Google Tag Manager on them.
16. If a website has HTTPS then it means it is SSL certified and it is safe and secure.
17. Sites that contain too many meta keyword tags tend to be nearly spammy.
18. Meta descriptions should be 155 - 160 characters long. Spammy sites usually write long meta descriptions.
19. Spammy sites use words that are closely associated with adult content, gaming, casino sites and more. You should avoid using such words on your website.

Monitoring and maintaining a low spam score

You should regularly monitor your website using tools to find your spam score. A high score is an indication that you should investigate the reason behind it. This will help to find the issues that may negatively affect your SEO. 

Conclusion

A high spam score can hurt your search engine rankings and if the search engine finds your website to be spammy then you will be penalised. Therefore you should understand the spam score metric. Conclusion