What Is Spam Score? (+ Best Practices to Lower Spam Score)

Spam score definition

A spam score is a metric that measures a website’s likelihood of being penalized by search engines for engaging in spammy practices. Spam scores range from 1% to 100%, with 1% having the lowest probability of being flagged as spammy.

If you want your website to rank in search engine results pages (SERPs), you may be employing search engine optimization (SEO) best practices and tactics.

Paying attention to your page’s spam score is also an excellent way to ensure that search engines like Google won’t penalize you. On this page, we’ll cover everything you need to know about spam scores, including:

• What is spam score?
• How do you find your spam score?
• Factors that affect spam score
• Impacts of a high spam score
• Best practices to decrease your spam score

Keep reading to learn about the factors affecting your spam score and how to lower it.

Explore: Your Crash Course to White Hat SEO

What is spam score?

A spam score is a metric indicating a website’s likelihood of being penalized by search engines for engaging in spammy practices.

A high spam score doesn’t necessarily mean a website is spammy. Several factors impact your spam score.

It may often indicate a poorly developed and maintained website. That being said, some websites practice black-hat SEO to deceive search engines and users, which would result in a higher spam score.

How do you find your spam score?

Tools like Moz Pro feature spam score checkers. Type in your domain name, and you’ll get a brief report.

Your spam score will fall into one of three categories:

• Low: between 1% to 30%
• Moderate: between 31% to 60%
• High: between 61% and 100%

An ideal spam score should be less than 5%. If your spam score is low, you have nothing to worry about.

You should address a moderate or high spam score immediately. Leaving your website unchecked may result in unfavorable feedback from your audience and even result in search engines penalizing your website.

10 factors affecting spam score

There are various signals and factors that impact your spam score. You should be aware of the following if you are having trouble with spam.

Factors that affect your spam score

1. Website size and backlinks
2. Backlink diversity
3. Ratio of nofollow and dofollow links
4. Branded anchor text in backlinks
5. Number of external links vs. internal links
6. Anchor text-heavy page
7. Domain length
8. Available contact information
9. Numbers in the domain
10. Content quality

Let’s go through each one:

1. Website size and backlinks

If your website has many pages but few internal links, it may be flagged as spammy. Search engines mark websites as spam if they believe that they don’t have valuable content.

Backlinks often indicate that pages are worth being referred to by other pages and sites. If you have a new website, ensure that your pages are interlinked to signal that each page contains valuable information.

2. Backlink diversity

Low link diversity means that most of a site’s backlinks are from the same domains. If your website has over 1000 backlinks from only 10 websites, you have low link diversity.

This may increase your spam score, as low link diversity might signal that the links are from black-hat efforts to increase your backlinks.

3. Ratio of nofollow and dofollow links

If you have a lot more dofollow links than nofollow links, it increases the chances of a search engine flagging your website as spam.

A nofollow link is a link that tells search engines not to pass link juice to the page to which it’s referring. It has a rel=“nofollow” HTML tag and won’t improve the referred page’s ranking in SERPs.

Meanwhile, a dofollow link passes link juice to the page to which it’s referring. A higher number of dofollow links than nofollow links may signal search engines that a website is buying those unnatural dofollow links.

4. Branded anchor text in backlinks

A branded anchor text in a backlink uses a brand’s name in the anchor text, and improves a brand’s authority and ranking in the SERPs.

Websites that naturally gain backlinks typically get them from links with branded anchor text. If a website has a higher number of backlinks with non-branded anchor text, it can impact your spam score.

5. Number of external links vs. internal links

Many spammy websites, like low-quality blog directories, have more external links than internal links.

That said, if your site has a significantly higher number of external links than internal links, it may trigger search engines to view your website as spammy. You need a balanced number of internal and external links to keep your spam score low.

6. Anchor text-heavy page

You also need to balance the anchor text and the amount of content you have on your pages.

Websites that have pages with a lot of anchor text but little valuable content raise red flags to search engines. Ensuring you have valuable content with authoritative anchor text links will keep your spam score low.

7. Domain length

Google views websites with long domains as an attempt to keyword stuff for ranking purposes.

Keyword stuffing goes against Google’s rules. For this reason, keep your domain short and sweet.

8. Available contact information

A reputable website will always have contact information on it. Create a dedicated Contact Us page and add it to your header or footer navigation.

Having contact information tells your visitors that you’re a legitimate business that they can reach.

9. Numbers in the domain name

Most domain names contain only words. While some legitimate domain names have numbers, they may confuse users and tell search engines that the site could be spam.

If your business name has numbers in it, spell out the number instead. For example, instead of 5starpetboarding.com, you can use fivestarpetboarding.com.

10. Content quality

Users want high-quality content that can answer their search intent. And search engines want to deliver.

In 2022, Google rolled out its helpful content algorithm update, which aims to show relevant and helpful information for searchers.

The search engine giant also released its E-E-A-T guidelines. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Your content must demonstrate all these for users and search engines to trust you.

That said, if you publish a lot of thin and low-quality content, like through AI tools, you’re at risk of increasing your spam score.

Impacts of a high spam score

A high spam score will hurt your website ranking. When your audience searches for your business, chances are you won’t show up on the first page of the SERPs.

Google may even penalize your site for violating its Search Essentials and spam guidelines. As a result, your website may get very little organic traffic. Your prospects won’t find your business and learn about your offerings.

You may spend a lot of money advertising your business and get some site visits. However, you need organic traffic to grow your number of site visitors in the long run and improve your business’s online credibility. Ranking in relevant SERPs is also important to get ahead of your competitors.

That said, decreasing your spam score is essential to boosting your organic site traffic and seeing long-term success.

Best practices to decrease your spam score

The good news is that there are best practices you can follow to reduce your spam score. Let’s take a look at some of the measures that you can put in place:

• Regularly conduct a website audit: Go through all your website backlinks and identify any bad links.
• Remove bad links: Remove any links from your website that come across as spammy or are from low-quality websites. Focus on finding authoritative sources that you can link to your web pages.
• Improve content quality: Your content should be relevant and valuable to searchers. Audit your content, and refresh any content that is outdated. Stay clear of keyword stuffing because search engines will penalize you.
• Improve on-page SEO: You can improve your SEO by optimizing meta tags, headers, and page content. Improving page load speed and mobile responsiveness also improves your SEO score.
• Secure your website: You can take several measures to secure your site. One of them is to use HTTPS, which encrypts data transmitted between a browser and your website. Getting a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate is also a basic security measure you must take.

Decrease your spam score With WebFX

Your website’s spam score is an important metric to track. A high spam score can result in a penalty from search engines, leading to lower organic traffic and fewer prospects learning about your business.

If you need help with decreasing your spam score and optimizing your website to rank in relevant search results, consider partnering with WebFX.

We’re a full-service digital marketing agency with 25+ years of experience improving our clients’ ranking in SERPs. Our team of SEO experts will take the time to understand your business and needs, and craft a custom strategy that reduces your spam score and boosts your online presence.

Contact us online or call us at 888-601-5359 to speak with a strategist about our SEO services!