MOZ Spam Score (SS) and its Reliability

RayChand

RayChand

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After hunting down expired domains, it just came to my notice that MOZ Spam Score or SS as popularly known is far from being reliable. Many times a spam score of 50% or higher, but backlinks research at MOZ, Majestic and Ahrefs do not show any shady linkbacks. And after keeping of track of that domain, only to find the same domain being used 6 months later as a strong PBN and the spam score then is much lesser. What I believe is even after the shady links drop there is a delay in update of spam score or the Spam Score itself is far from reliable.

Any thoughts ?
 
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Mr Positive said:
Google said their SS is not important and many here too don’t check it
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You are right to some extent but the method of spam check is not going to be very different by Google, more or less same, may be a bit different.
 
instead of just checking the spam score, i prefer to check how many pages from that particular website have been indexed in the last week, by Google. I do keep the DA in mind however, whenever i check this.
For ex: say, a website with DA 21 has 10-12 pages indexed in the past week and the ss is 20%. in that case i'll further run a basic check on the website's content and also see if it providing links to a lot of adult, gambling or any such niche websites.
now, if the no. of pages indexed in the past week is good, this alone is proof enough that google does not see it as spam and i can go for it as well. so, these are a few things i keep in mind in addition to the spam score
 
Aniket Roy said:
instead of just checking the spam score, i prefer to check how many pages from that particular website have been indexed in the last week, by Google. I do keep the DA in mind however, whenever i check this.
For ex: say, a website with DA 21 has 10-12 pages indexed in the past week and the ss is 20%. in that case i'll further run a basic check on the website's content and also see if it providing links to a lot of adult, gambling or any such niche websites.
now, if the no. of pages indexed in the past week is good, this alone is proof enough that google does not see it as spam and i can go for it as well. so, these are a few things i keep in mind in addition to the spam score
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Indexation is a good indication but may not work well for expired domains, yes for pending deletion and auction domains this may be a good indicator.
 
I personally use majestic and moz myself. But i more consider about TF and CF. I am not concerning SS either..
 
AshleyHarvey said:
I personally use majestic and moz myself. But i more consider about TF and CF. I am not concerning SS either..
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No, you definitely need to consider SS because a domain which has got a large number of spurious backlinks pointed especially blog comment spam and forum spam can even have problems in getting indexed itself forget about giving any weightage to your rankings.
 
RayChand said:
No, you definitely need to consider SS because a domain which has got a large number of spurious backlinks pointed especially blog comment spam and forum spam can even have problems in getting indexed itself forget about giving any weightage to your rankings.
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As per the Moz
spam score is percentage of sites with similar features we've found to be penalized or banned by Google. Spam Score is based on our machine learning model which identified 27 common features among the millions of banned or penalized sites in the data we fed it.
Click to expand...

Further they also stated that
A high Spam Score for your site, or a site you're looking at, doesn't mean this site is spammy. It's a sign that you should do some more investigation into the quality and relevance of this site
Click to expand...

They also clarified that it is not a calculation of spam score of sites linking to your site so they don't consider spam score of backlinks while calculating your site.
Also If you check their 27 common features it includes low numbers of pages, length of domain, title tag, description, Meta keywords, links to linkedin, canonical, favicon icon, Facebook pixel, google tag manager code and many things that many of the sites lack and hence the sites are having high spam score due to that.

Thank you, till now I never taken spam score seriously but after reading their criteria for calculating spam score I think I am going to avoid DA, PA to as these metrics can be easily manipulated these days.

RayChand said:
After hunting down expired domains, it just came to my notice that MOZ Spam Score or SS as popularly known is far from being reliable. Many times a spam score of 50% or higher, but backlinks research at MOZ, Majestic and Ahrefs do not show any shady linkbacks. And after keeping of track of that domain, only to find the same domain being used 6 months later as a strong PBN and the spam score then is much lesser. What I believe is even after the shady links drop there is a delay in update of spam score or the Spam Score itself is far from reliable.

Any thoughts ?
Click to expand...
Coming to your question if you read their 27 common features then you will come to know what needs to be changed to reduce the spam score. You will get your answer if you compare site with 50% spam score with same site when the spam score is reduce, you will get the idea what considered by Moz to determine spam score.
People just see the spam score is high and they run to check for shady linkbacks but Moz never told that spam score is depends on shady backlinks.

Reference:
Code: 
https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score

Even google has 28% spam score:eek: (Just checked out of curiosity:))
 
vinayseo said:
As per the Moz

Further they also stated that


They also clarified that it is not a calculation of spam score of sites linking to your site so they don't consider spam score of backlinks while calculating your site.
Also If you check their 27 common features it includes low numbers of pages, length of domain, title tag, description, Meta keywords, links to linkedin, canonical, favicon icon, Facebook pixel, google tag manager code and many things that many of the sites lack and hence the sites are having high spam score due to that.

Thank you, till now I never taken spam score seriously but after reading their criteria for calculating spam score I think I am going to avoid DA, PA to as these metrics can be easily manipulated these days.


Coming to your question if you read their 27 common features then you will come to know what needs to be changed to reduce the spam score. You will get your answer if you compare site with 50% spam score with same site when the spam score is reduce, you will get the idea what considered by Moz to determine spam score.
People just see the spam score is high and they run to check for shady linkbacks but Moz never told that spam score is depends on shady backlinks.

Reference:
Code: 
https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score

Even google has 28% spam score:eek: (Just checked out of curiosity:))
Click to expand...
Pretty neat explanation.

But Google will never tell you what they determine as a spammy website. Since they are handing out penalties for unnatural link building it's quite obvious that they do have a count or threshold of spam for any domain after which it falls into the trap of manual review.
 
spam score is not important. See historical content. Has an illegal broadcast been made?
 
manual checking is the only way to actually check links,
none of these metrics really matter to google, only some of them can be used for an initial filtering
 
ignore the spam score but always use Valid DMRC, SPF And DKIM Record To get Maximum Inbox If you used for mailing, seo will not impacted for spam record
 
this metric is complete nonsense. you can just ignore it, just as google does ;)
 
itz_styx said:
this metric is complete nonsense. you can just ignore it, just as google does ;)
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Issue comes up with some of the customers, they are tough nut when it comes to making them understand basics
 
RayChand said:
Issue comes up with some of the customers, they are tough nut when it comes to making them understand basics
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thats true, but you can always try to show customers the quote from google themselfs where they state that MOZ spam score means nothing to them ;)
 
RayChand said:
Pretty neat explanation.

But Google will never tell you what they determine as a spammy website. Since they are handing out penalties for unnatural link building it's quite obvious that they do have a count or threshold of spam for any domain after which it falls into the trap of manual review.
Click to expand...
Yes you are right google will never tell us what they determine as a spammy website but they do have a record and for that matter you can either check their index status of website.
I used google search operators to find new sites for backlinks
Code: 
http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
When I started the SEO it is the first thing I learned and I think it is most powerful as because of this I assure about few things that the site I got for backlink is relevant to my niche, it is indexable as I found it on google itself and a little to good amount of traffic.
As far as I assure about relevancy and good traffic site I don't consider any other metric for backlink. Off course It is my opinion which comes from my experience. You opinion can be different but basics are same google always love backlinks created from relevant and good engagement sites.
Hope it helps you :)
 
vinayseo said:
Code: 
http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html
When I started the SEO it is the first thing I learned and I think it is most powerful as because of this I assure about few things that the site I got for backlink is relevant to my niche, it is indexable as I found it on google itself and a little to good amount of traffic.
As far as I assure about relevancy and good traffic site I don't consider any other metric for backlink.
Click to expand...
Also, never make all backlinks niche relevant, natural backlinks will always be from many sources and niche relevancy ratio can be on the higher side but never the only option of link building.
 
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