How to Reduce Spam Score of a Domain in 2024
The Spam Score is a metrics that define the health status of your website. MOZ created a spam score in 2015 to help website owners with information about how much spam score a website is at risk of. Spam score is a metric used to identify a website’s relevancy with the search engine penalized websites for spamming practices. Throughout the article, you will get to know what is spam score, how important it is, how to reduce spam score of a domain, and more.
Table of Content
- What is a Spam Score?
- Why It is Important To Reduce Spam Score?
- How does Spam Score Increase?
- How to Reduce Spam Score of a Domain?
- How to Disavow Backlinks?
- - Step 1: Identify Spam Backlinks
- - Step 2: Find the Spam Score of Those Sites
- - Step 3: Create Disavow Backlink File
- - Step 4: Submit the Disavow Backlink List
- Conclusion
- FAQ
What is a Spam Score?
Ranking in the search engine depends on several factors. Spam score is one of them. It is a number that reflects the percentage of similarity your website with the search engine penalized websites. In other words, the spam score is the number that shows the percentages of similarity between your website and the penalized website.
- A score between 0%-30% is considered as low
- A score between 31%-60% is considered a medium.
- A score of 61%-100% is considered a high.
A low spam score is considered good and above 61 % is considered as risky.
Why It is Important To Reduce Spam Score?
The importance of knowing how to reduce spam score of a domain is many. Firstly it effects A high spam score can negatively impact a website’s search engine rankings. Google uses spam scores to evaluate the trustworthiness and quality of a site. Websites with lower spam scores are more likely to rank higher in search results.
Users are less likely to trust a website that has been flagged as spam. Trustworthy websites are crucial for retaining visitors and converting them into customers. A high spam score can damage a website’s reputation, leading to negative perceptions among users.
Many web platforms and advertising networks have restrictions against spam. Violating these can lead to penalties, including the suspension of accounts. So, reducing the spam score of website is essential for maintaining a strong online presence, ensuring good user experience, and achieving business objectives.
How does Spam Score Increase?
First, it is important to know how spam score increases before knowing how to reduce spam score of a domain. The spam score is not a metric of Google rather it was created by MOZ to identify the probable spam score of website. MOZ mentioned 27 reasons that may increase the spam score of website. Those are:
- Low Page Count: If your website has a low number of pages, it can increase your spam score. MOZ identified this because many spam sites have low page count.
- Some Specific TLDs: Some top-level domains such as .download, .stream, .win, .biz, .info, or .cc are mostly used in spammed sites. So using those TLDs increases the chances that your website may also do the same.
- Domain Name Length: The length of your subdomain and root domain can also increase the spam score. Most spamming sites use too lengthy or too small domain names. So your domain name falls under this, there is a high chance that your spam score will increase.
- Number in Domain Name: Spam sites commonly associate numeric characters in the domain name. So if your domain has numeric characters, it might be the reason for a high spam score.
- Google Font API: Not using special fonts such as Google Font API is common among spam sites. Websites that do not use special fonts are more likely to be considered spam sites. So, spam score increases.
- Google Tag Manager: No spamming sites use Google Tag Manager. So, MOZ identified it as one of the reasons for to increase in spam score.
- Double Click Tag: Websites that don’t use the Double click ad tag are more likely to be considered spam sites. It is one of the factors that can influence spam scores.
- Phone Number: If your website doesn’t contain a phone number, your spam score may increase. Because spam sites rarely have phone numbers on their pages.
- Linked LinkedIn: Lacking an associated LinkedIn account with the website may also increase the spam score.
- Email Address: No spam sites have email addresses. So it increases the similarity if your website also doesn’t have one.
- SSL Certificate: Having https is always is good signal that increases trustworthiness. Most of the spam sites don’t invest in SSL certificates.
- Meta Keywords: Using meta keywords is one of the signs of a spam site. So it increases spam score.
- Low Website Visits: Spam sites have low visitors. So, if your website has low visitors it creates a similarity and that’s why the spam score increases.
- External Canonical: An external canonical is when rel=”canonical” link elements point to an external URL.
- Meta Title Length: Very short or very long meta titles are often associated with spam websites.
- Meta Description Length: A very long meta description or too short indicates your website has a similarity with spam sites.
- Meta Keyword Length: Very long meta keywords are often found on spam sites. So, using very long-tail meta keywords can increase the spam score.
- Favicon: If your website does not have a favicon, your spam score will increase. Spam sites rarely use favicon.
- Facebook Pixel: Almost no spam site connected to Facebook Pixel. So, it might be a reason for increasing spam scores.
- Backlinks/ External Linking: Spam sites have abnormally high or low external links. So, if your website has abnormal backlinks it might be the reason.
- Referring Domain: Spam sites use abnormally high or low backlinks from unique domains. This might be the reason behind the high spam score.
- The Ratio of Backing to Content: If your website has low content but high backlinks, or more content but fewer backlinks, it refers to an abnormal links ratio to content. Spam sites have an abnormal link-to-content ratio.
- Vowel/ Consonants in Domain Name: Spam site domains often have sequential vowels or consonants. It is one of the signals that your website can also be the same.
- Hyphen in Domain Name: If your domain has a hyphen, it may increase your spam score. Because multiple hyphens in the domain are mostly found on spam sites.
- URL Length: Spam sites often have short or too-long URL path lengths. Having unusual URL on the website can be a reason for increasing spam scores.
- Poison Words in Domain: Spam site domains contain poisonous words such as adult, gaming, pharmaceuticals, or others. Having these types of words increases the spam score.
- High CPC Anchor Text: Spam sites often target anchor text with high CPC for out links. Using high CPC anchors can increase the spam score of your site.
How to Reduce Spam Score of a Domain?
To get well-ranked in the search engine, your website must have a low spam score. The answer for how to reduce spam score of a domain lies in the section on how spam score increases. If you strictly maintain the chances of increasing your spam score, your spam score will not increase.
But the most common reason for increasing spam score is getting backlinks from a spamming site. Sometimes your competitors can intentionally create backlinks for you in a spamming site. The intention can be to increase your spam score and decrease your search engine ranking. So, how to remain safe, and how to reduce spam score of a domain? Find the answer below.
Google has a complaint box to handle this kind of unwanted backlink issue. You have to create a disavow link list and submit it to Google. This indicates those links were not created by you and you want to remove those.
How to Disavow Backlinks?
One of the prime reasons for increasing spam scores is getting unnatural backlinks from spamming websites. Disavowing backlinks is one of the most effective ways how to reduce spam score of a domain. To keep the website safe from unnatural links, you have to submit a disavow list to Google. Below you will find the steps on how to reduce spam score of a domain by disavowing backlinks.
Step 1: Identify Spam Backlinks
The first step of how to reduce spam score of a domain starts with identifying the links that are not created by you and which links are harming you. You can get help from different tools to identify those links.
- SEMrush: I highly recommend this tool. Create an account in SEMrush. Choose a paid plan according to your needs, or you can use the free version for basic analysis. It allows you 7 days free trial.
- Log in to SEMrush and from the menu on the left click on “Backlink Analysis”
- Then you will find the number of backlinks your website has
- Click on the backlink numbers
- You will find a list of your backlinks.
- Identify the links that are not created by you or those that seem to spam you.
- Ahrefs: Ahrefs is a free SEO tool that allows backlink checking. Visit Ahrefs backlink checker, type your domain, and click on the check backlink button. You will find a list of your backlinks.
Step 2: Find the Spam Score of Those Sites
After you have identified unnatural links, check the spam score of those links. To check the spam score:
- Visit the website SEO checker
- Type your domain and click on check
You will find the spam score of your domain. And if it is above 60%, it is alarming.
Step 3: Create Disavow Backlink File
The format for creating a disavow file is very simple.
- Open a notepad
- Type the URLs of those spam sites
- Then type the domain of those sites if you want to disallow any link from that particular domain.
Using this format you can make your disavow backlink list.
Step 4: Submit the Disavow Backlink List
Google has a separate page, where you can report unnatural spamming backlinks of your website. This is called disavow.
- Visit Search Console – Disavow Links
- Select the property
- Upload the disavow backlink file have created.
It will take some time to remove all the spamming links and once it is all removed, the spam score will automatically go down. So, the answer to the question of how to reduce spam score of a domain lies in these 4 steps. You can follow these steps or hire an SEO expert in Dhaka who can work for you to reduce spam score.
Conclusion
There are around 1.13 billion websites in the world. Search engines always ensure you get the best result of your query. A spam score is a number that indicates the overall condition of your website in terms of spam. The lower it is, the better it is. Maintaining a good spam score indicates to search engines that your website is trustworthy and provides value to the audience. It helps to get a good rank.
Sometimes spam score increases unnaturally because of some specific reasons. In this article, everything is discussed about how to reduce spam score of a domain. Follow those steps to reduce spam score of a domain. Regularly monitoring and managing spam scores can help maintain a healthy and effective online presence.
FAQ
MOZ is a company that builds tools for SEO, content marketing, market research, digital PR, and local SEO. It was founded in 2004 by Rand Fishkin and Gillian Muessig.
A Spam website is those websites or web pages that are created only for good search ranking without giving any value to users.
Search engine penalized websites are those websites that were created by not following the search engine standard and get penalized by search engines. The penalty is website will remain out of search results.
The root domain is the main domain. Ex: home page name, rakibuzzaman.net. On the other hand, subdomain is when we create a smaller part of a website such as seo.rakibuzzaman.net
SSL certificate is a certificate that is given after verifying the trustworthiness and authentication of the website. SSL certificate enables “S” after HTTP and having HTTPs indicates secure website.
Meta keywords is the keyword that is written on webpage’s HTML source code. It indicate search engines about a page’s content. It is not visible to visitors.
CPC is cost per click. It refers to the charge of a keyword when it get clicked in paid ads.
Anchor text is the text on which internal or external links were linked.
Unnatural links are those backlinks that was created by someone else. Mostly it is created to increase competitors spam score.
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