Investigating Spam Score
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s Covered?
In this guide, you’ll learn how to investigate your site’s Spam Score in an effort to better understand how you can improve it.
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Key Points About Spam Score
Before launching into a plan to investigate your Spam Score, it’s important to understand what Spam Score is and what the score reflects for your site.
It’s important to remember that Spam Score is NOT a measurement of the spamminess of links pointing to your site. It is NOT dependent on your backlink profile but instead represents the percentage of sites with similar features to the site you’re researching which we've found to be penalized or banned by Google.
What does that mean?
This means that your Spam Score is based entirely on your own site and its features, setup, and content. It also means that disavowing links is not the best strategy for improving your Spam Score. Instead, the best way to improve your Spam Score is to review the 27 common features associated with sites which have been penalized to see how and where you can improve. Additionally, since this score is based on correlation with penalization rather than causation, the solution isn't necessarily to change these factors on your site.
In the next few sections of this guide we will talk about which Spam Score signals can be investigated with the Moz Tools and how to do that. We’ll also outline the ones which you’ll need to review manually on your site.
Please note: The Spam Score signals outlined below are in no particular order.
Spam Score Signals to Investigate with the Moz Tools
The Spam Score signals below can be investigated using various Moz tools. While investigating these signals on your site, be sure to keep in mind that their presence does not automatically indicate spamminess. The intention here is to investigate possible causes of a higher Spam Score and see if it makes sense to make changes to your site based on your overall SEO strategy. In many cases, you may opt to not make any changes or you may not be able to implement certain changes to your site based on your business goals, industry, or SEO goals.
Low number of pages found
Our crawlers discovered only a small number of pages on this domain. This is not an inherent problem, but many spam sites have small numbers of pages, hence the correlation.
How to Investigate
There are a few ways you can investigate this signal in Moz Pro. The first would be by setting up a Moz Pro Campaign in which you will be able to see the number of pages our Campaign crawler, rogerbot, is able to access and crawl. Once your crawl is complete, you can verify the number of pages discovered and crawled within the Site Crawl section of the Campaign. We’ll even show you the number of pages crawled over time.
If the counts in either of these tools seems low, there may be an issue with crawlers being able to access and crawl your site.
- Learn more about how to investigate when pages aren’t crawled in Site Crawl
- Learn more about investigating fluctuations in pages crawled
Defaults to HTTPS
Few spam sites invest in SSL certificates; HTTPS is often a good trust signal.
How to Investigate
If you need to double check that your site defaults to HTTPS, head to a browser window and enter the HTTP version of your root domain. You should then be redirected to the HTTPS version of your site.
You can also verify this in Moz Pro within the All Crawled Pages section of your Campaign. Within this section of Site Crawl, the tool will list all the pages crawled during the most recent site crawl for your Campaign. Any pages with a protocol of HTTP should show a redirect status code if they are properly set up to default to HTTPs. You can also use the filter options to narrow the list of crawled pages to only those with an HTTP status code to verify this information.
Use of Meta Keywords
Pages that use the meta keywords tag are more likely to be spam than those that don't.
How to Investigate
Moz’s free Chrome Extension, MozBar, allows you to verify the presence of meta keywords on any page of your site. With MozBar enabled, click the Page Analysis icon. From the On-Page Elements tab, you will see a field for Meta Keywords which will note if this tag is found and what it contains.
Rel Canonical
Utilizing a non-local rel=canonical tag is often associated with spam.
How to Investigate
Moz’s free Chrome Extension, MozBar, allows you to verify the rel=canonical tag for any page of your site. With MozBar enabled, click the Page Analysis icon. From the General Attributes tab, you will see a field for Rel=“canonical” which will note if this tag is found and what it contains.
Length of Title Element
Pages with very long or very short titles are correlated with spam sites.
How to Investigate
Moz Pro’s Site Crawl will alert you to any titles on your site that are too long or too short so you’re able to review them. To get started, head to Site Crawl > Metadata Issues. From here you’ll have the option to view pages with titles that are too long or titles that are too short.
Length of Meta Description
Pages with very long or very short meta description tags are correlated with spam sites.
How to Investigate
Moz Pro’s Site Crawl will alert you to any titles on your site that are too long or too short so you’re able to review them. To get started, head to Site Crawl > Metadata Issues. From here you’ll have the option to view pages with meta descriptions that are too long or too short.
Length of Meta Keywords
Pages with very long meta keywords tags are often found on spam sites.
How to Investigate
Moz’s free Chrome Extension, MozBar, allows you to verify the presence of meta keywords on any page of your site. With MozBar enabled, click the Page Analysis icon. From the On-Page Elements tab, you will see a field for Meta Keywords which will note if this tag is found and what it contains.
URL Length
Spam pages often have abnormally short or long URL path lengths.
How to Investigate
Moz Pro’s Site Crawl will alert you to any titles on your site that are too long or too short so you’re able to review them. To get started, head to Site Crawl > Metadata Issues. From here you’ll have the option to view pages with URLs which are too long.
Alternatively, you can head to your All Crawled Pages section to export a CSV of the pages included in your latest crawl report. Within the export, column R will indicate the length of the URL. You can then sort and filter to see which URLs are longest and shortest.
Number of Domains Linked-To
Spam sites are more likely to have abnormally high or low unique domains to which they link.
How to Investigate
Within the Link Explorer tool, head to Top Pages to see a count of Outbound Domains for pages our index crawler, dotbot, has crawled.
In the CSV export of this data, column G will indicate how many outbound domains there are for each page, as well. By exporting the data you can sort and filter as needed to investigate further.
Number of External Outlinks
Spam sites are more likely to have abnormally high or low external outlinks.
How to Investigate
Within the Link Explorer tool, head to Top Pages > Export CSV. Column H will indicate how many outbound links were found on each page our crawler, dotbot, encountered.
Spam Score Signals Requiring Self Investigation
The Spam Score signals below will require investigation outside of the Moz Pro Tools. Just a reminder that while investigating these signals on your site keep in mind that their presence does not automatically indicate spamminess. The intention here is to investigate possible causes of a higher Spam Score and see if it makes sense to make changes to your site based on your overall SEO strategy. In many cases, you may opt to not make any changes or you may not be able to implement certain changes to your site based on your business goals, industry, or SEO goals.
TLD correlated with spam domains - Certain top level domains (e.g. .download .stream .win .biz)are more commonly associated with spammy sites.
Domain name length - The length of the subdomain and root domain is similar to those used by spam sites.
Domain name contains numerals - Numeric characters being included in the domain name is often associated with spam sites.
Google Font API Present - Domains which do not use special fonts (e.g. Google Font API) are often more likely to be spam sites. Lacking this special font feature was common among spam sites we found.
Google Tag Manager - Google Tag Manager is almost never present on spam sites. (Tips for Investigation - Google Tag Manager is a free tool which allows users to manage tags on their site (like Google Analytics tracking codes). You can learn more about Google Tag Manager here.)
Doubleclick Present - The Doubleclick ad tag is almost never present on spam sites.
Phone Number Present - Spam sites rarely have real phone numbers present on their pages. (Tips for Investigation - Be sure to verify that there is a phone number noted on your site.)
Links to LinkedIn - Almost no spam sites have an associated LinkedIn page, hence lacking this feature is correlated with spam. (Tips for Investigation - If your company uses LinkedIn, check that a link to your LinkedIn page is present on your site.)
Email Address Present - Email addresses are almost never present on spam sites. (Tips for Investigation - Be sure to verify that there is a contact email noted on your site.)
Visit Rank - Websites with very few visits in clickstream panels were more often spam than those with high numbers of visits.
Browser Icon - Spam sites rarely use a favicon; non-spam sites often do. (Tips for Investigation - A favicon is the small icon that appears on a browser tab when your site is open. It’s also used when your site is saved as a bookmark.)
Facebook Pixel - The Facebook tracking pixel is almost never present on spam sites.
Ratio of External Links to Content - Spam sites are more likely to have abnormal ratios of links to content.
Vowels/Consonants in Domain Name - Spam sites often have many sequential vowels or consonants in their domain name.
Hyphens in Domain Name - Spam sites are more likely to use multiple hyphens in their domain name.
Presence of Poison Words - Spam sites often employ specific words that are associated with webspam topics like pharmaceuticals, adult content, gaming, and others.
Uses High CPC Anchor Text - Spam sites often employ specific words in the anchor text of outlinks that are associated with webspam topics like pharmaceuticals, adult content, gaming, and others.
Next Steps
Once you’ve investigated each of the 27 signals outlined above you’ll be better equipped to develop a plan to work on improving your overall Spam Score. Be sure to touch base with anyone working on your site and/or SEO before making any changes. Remember! These signals, and Spam Score in general, are not necessarily indications that your site is spammy. Since this score is based on correlation with penalization rather than causation, the solution isn't necessarily to change these factors on your site. If you have not had any penalties you shouldn’t be concerned about a Low or Medium score. It is best to use this percentage score to judge the quality of inbound links to your site, giving you a signal to help you determine which of those links needs some further investigation and, perhaps, even removal.
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