Spam Score
Definition: Spam Score is a third-party Moz metric estimating the percentage of sites with similar features to a given site that Moz found to be penalized or banned by Google; it is a correlation-based warning, not a Google signal.
Also called: Moz Spam Score
Updated
How it works
Moz built Spam Score by studying sites that Google had penalized or removed from its index and identifying features they had in common, such as thin content, unusual link patterns and very low authority. A site’s score is the percentage of sites in Moz’s data with similar features that were penalized or banned. A Spam Score of 30% means roughly three in ten sites that look like this one, by Moz’s measures, ran into trouble.
That makes it a vendor claim about statistical resemblance. It is not information from Google, and Google does not use it.
Reading it correctly
- A high score is a reason to look, not a verdict. Plenty of legitimate sites share surface features with spam sites.
- Small and new sites often score higher, because low authority and a thin link profile are among the features the model weighs.
- The score describes the site, not a specific link. A link from a site with a high score is not automatically harmful to you.
Our view: Spam Score is most useful as a filter for prioritizing which linking sites to inspect by hand, and least useful as a disavow list.
Checking a site by hand
Before acting on a score, open the site and ask:
- Does it have real content written for people, or scraped and spun text?
- Does it link out to many unrelated commercial sites, especially with exact-match anchor text?
- Is it indexed in Google? A
site:search gives a rough answer. - Is your link part of a pattern you or someone on your behalf created, such as a paid network?
Only the last question really changes what you should do, as explained under toxic backlinks. The backlink checker lists the sites linking to you so you can review the ones that matter.