HOW TO REDUCE WEBSITE SPAM SCORE 

Are bad backlinks the main cause of a website having a high spam score? There are several myths about spam score and Trybeweb will be addressing most of them in this article.

Moz Spam Score Breakdown

Website Spam Score was introduced by Moz in 2015 as a guide for webmasters to know how good their website is. Spam Score is a web analytical data created by Moz’s web research and development department based on extensively analyzed data culled from Google for ranking of websites in their database.

Table Of Contents

• How to identify a Good spam score
• Does spam score affect wesite's SEO?
• How to check spam score
• How to reduce high spam score
• Moz Signals for checking spam score

Initially, there were 17 factors (signals) used to determine the spam score of every website, but as time and Google ranking metrics changed these factors has increased to 27.

How to Identify a Good spam score

According to Moz, they are spam score levels (flags) that determine the health of your website. Website’s with spam flag between 0 – 4 is in the safe zone and the web owners have nothing to worry about. You should probably run some analysis on your website when your spam flag is between 5 – 7 because your website is drifting into the troublesome territory. Your website has a high risk of suffering from Google penalties when your spam flag is between 8 – 17.

Does Spam Score Affect Website’s SEO?

Having Spammy Backlinks is the quickest way to increase the Spam Score of every website. Although one spam backlink does not kill your website, gathering more spam links to your website is like hoarding lots of viruses on your computer without an anti-virus (it will lead to the death of your computer).

It has been proven that Google always check the health of a website as a ranking factor, the higher your website’s Spam Score, the harder it becomes for it to rank at the top of Google’s search result.

Spam links are the number one contributor when a site loses its Google ranking, suffers deindexing, or gets penalized. Keeping away from spam links is an essential way to keep a low Spam Score.

How To Check Spam Score?

There are several websites that offer free Spam Score checker but they are all linked back to MOZ. To check your MOZ Spam Score, all you need to do is visit https://www.moz.com/free-seo-tools, enter your website’s URL and click on Analyze. It will give you details of your Domain Authority, Linking Root Domain, Ranking Keywords and Spam Score Percentage.

You will also get details about your;

·       7 top pages based on their Page Authority.

·   6 top linking domains (backlinks based on how high their Domain Authority).

·       Lost and discovered backlinks in the past 60 days.

·       Top ranking keywords.

·       Top featured snippets.

·       Branded keywords.

·       Keyword ranking distribution.

·       Top competitors (websites with similar keywords).

To get the full features of MOZ, you will have to subscribe to the MozPro package which is valued at $99/month. A 30-days free trial is available to everyone who is interested (I recommend you use the 30-days free trial to get a feel of its maximum potential).

How To Reduce High Spam Score?

We will be talking about some the 27 signals used by MOZ in determining the Spam Score of every website. Having a high Spam Score doesn’t necessarily mean your website is spammy, but it serves as a warning system used to alert you that your website has similarities to other websites that have been penalized by Google.

MOZ Signals for checking spam score

High CPC Anchor Texts: Anchor texts are the visible words displayed when linking another URL on a website. Spam sites usually use this tactic to lure visitors into clicking unrelated links (which are mostly malicious). Fix: Make sure your anchor texts are related to the URL and also the URL does not lead to malicious websites.

Poison Words: These are specific words that when used constantly on a website, triggers search engines to ignore your website (they regard your website as low quality), poison words are usually placed on the title and header of blog posts. Words related to adult contents, gambling, and narcotics are mostly poison words. There are also common words that are regarded as poison words and they are being updated constantly. Fix: make an extensive research on poison words related to your niche, remove those words or exchange them with more friendly words.

Abnormal URL length: URL length are known to be important I SEO, they are also important in identifying a spam site. Most spam sites have unusual URLs lengths that might be too long or too short. Fix: URLs are recommended to be from (15 to 50 characters), if your website URL is very short (5 characters) or very long (100+ characters) your spam score might increase.

Hyphens In Domain Name: Hyphens (-) are usually used in the domain name of spam websites, making it hard for visitors to remember the domain name. Using hyphens in your domain name might increase your spam score. Fix: This is self-explanatory.

Consonants/Vowels In Domain Name: Consecutively placing vowels or consonant in your domain name is another way to increase your spam score. An example (https://bbheeaazz.com) would easily be flagged as a spam site.

Abnormal External Links To Content Ratio: If the ratio of external links pointing to contents in your website is not regular, your spam score might increase. Fix: Avoid building links illegally, allow other websites to manually give you backlinks, buying of backlinks is bad for websites.

Facebook Pixel: Facebook pixel is a Facebook developed code that webmasters place on their websites. This code collects data that can be used to track and understand conversions from Facebook ads, arrange target audience, optimize ads, and also remarket products to people who had earlier interacted with your website. Spam sites do not use Facebook Pixel on their website because they do not invest time and resources into their website. Fix: Adding Facebook Pixel on your website will increase its trust level.

Favicon: Favicon is a very small icon that appears at the top tabs (title location) of a web browser, Favicons are usually 16x16 pixels, they are usually the small version of the website’s logo. A favicon helps the visitor to easily locate your website when they are browsing with several tabs opened in the web browser. Fix: They are lots of free favicon web applications, create and add a Favicon to your website.

Meta Keywords Length: Spam sites usually use long meta keywords (some which are not related to their niche) as a strategy to drive traffic from search engines. Fix: Check your website’s HTML code for all meta keywords and remove long, unrelated keywords.

Meta Description Length: Meta Description gives users a hint of what to expect from your website when they click your link on search engines. Search engines usually use some keywords in the meta description to display search results, so using the right meta description is a good way to increase your SERP.

Title Element Length: Title elements show the title of the current page in the web browser, it is normally found at the browser tab (browser title bar) and it is a good way to know which page to open when you have several tabs of the same website. Spam sites traditionally use very short or very long title elements. Fix: Ensure that each webpage has its unique title element.

Rel Canonical: This is an HTML element used by webmasters to prevent having problems with duplicate contents in SEO, every web page is specified to be the “preferred” or “canonical” version of the webpage.

HTTPS: Hyper Transfer Protocol Secure best known as HTTPS is a secure transfer protocol used for data transfer and communication over a computer network. Getting a domain name without HTTPS (SSL Certificate) sends a warning to your visitors that their connection to your website is not secure. Spam sites do not really care about this, so it is common for spam sites not to HTTPS. Fix: Buy SSL Certificate and switch from HTTP to HTTPS.