If you want your website to rank high in search engine results pages (SERPs), chances are you’re employing search engine optimization (SEO) best practices and tactics.
Paying attention to your page’s Spam Score is also a great way to make sure you don’t get penalized by search engines like Google. In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about Spam Scores.
What is Spam Score?
Spam Score is a metric used in SEO to assess the potential risk of a website being penalized by search engines due to spam practices. A Spam Score represents the likelihood of a site being flagged as spam based on several factors. In the competitive digital SaaS and technology environment, maintaining a low Spam Score is crucial to ensuring the health and credibility of a website with search engines.
This metric emerged in response to the increasing use of spammy SEO tactics such as keyword stuffing, cloaking, and the use of link farms. These practices, aimed at manipulating search engine rankings, can damage a site’s reputation and lead to penalties. The Spam Score helps website owners and SEO professionals identify potential risks and take corrective action.
For SaaS and technology companies, where online visibility and search engine rankings are critical, understanding and monitoring the Spam Score is essential. It helps to avoid practices that could lead to penalties and maintain the integrity of a website in the digital space.
Your Spam Score will fall into one of three categories:
Low: between 1% and 30%
Moderate: between 31% and 60%
High: between 61% and 100%
An ideal Spam Score should be less than 5%. If your Spam Score is low, you have nothing to worry about.
10 factors that affect the Spam Score
There are several signals and factors that impact your Spam Score. You should be aware of the following if you are experiencing problems with spam.
Website size and backlinks
If your website has a lot of pages but few internal links, it may be flagged as spam. Search engines flag websites as spam if they believe they do not have valuable content.
Backlinks often indicate that pages deserve to be referenced by other sites. If you have a new website, make sure your pages are interlinked to signal that each page contains valuable information.
Diversity of backlinks
Low link diversity means that most of a site’s backlinks come from the same domains. If your website has over 1,000 backlinks from just 10 websites, you have low link diversity.
This can increase your Spam Score, as low link diversity could signal that the links are coming from “black-hat” efforts to increase your backlinks.
Relationship between nofollow and do-follow links
If you have many more dofollow links than nofollow links, you increase the chances that a search engine will flag your site as spam.
A nofollow link is a link that tells search engines not to pass link juice to the page it refers to. It has a rel=”nofollow” HTML tag and will not improve the referring page’s ranking in the SERPs.
Meanwhile, a do-follow link passes “link juice” to the page it refers to. A higher number of dofollow links than nofollow links can make search engines think that the site is buying those unnatural dofollow links.
Branded anchor text in backlinks
A branded anchor text in a backlink uses a brand’s name in the anchor text, which improves the brand’s authority and ranking in the SERPs.
Websites that get backlinks naturally often get them from links with branded anchor text. If a site has a higher number of backlinks with non-branded anchor text, this can affect its Spam Score.
Number of external links versus internal links
Many spammy websites, such as low-quality blog directories, have more external links than internal links.
That said, if your site has a significantly higher number of external links than internal ones, this can cause search engines to consider your site spammy. You need a balanced number of internal and external links to keep your Spam Score low.
Pages with a lot of anchor text
You also need to balance the anchor text and the amount of content you have on your pages.
Websites that have pages with a lot of anchor text but little valuable content raise red flags with search engines. Making sure you have valuable content with authoritative anchor text links will keep your Spam Score low.
Domain length
Google views websites with long domains as an attempt to stuff keywords for ranking purposes.
Keyword stuffing is against Google’s rules. For this reason, keep your domain short and to the point.
Contact information available
A reputable website will always have contact information. Create a dedicated “Contact Us” page and add it to your navigation in the header or footer.
Having contact information tells your visitors that you are a legitimate business that they can contact.
Numbers in the domain name
Most domain names contain only words. While some legitimate domain names have numbers, they can confuse users and cause search engines to consider the site spam.
If your business name has numbers, write the number in words. For example, instead of 5starpetboarding.com, you could use fivestarpetboarding.com.
Content quality
Users want high-quality content that can answer their search intent. And search engines want to deliver it.
The search engine giant also released its EEAT guidelines. EEAT stands for Expertise, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. Your content should demonstrate these four aspects in order for both users and search engines to trust you.
That said, if you publish a lot of low-quality or thin content, such as through AI tools, you run the risk of increasing your Spam Score.
Practices to reduce your Spam Score
The good news is that there are best practices you can follow to reduce your Spam Score. Let’s take a look at some of the steps you can take:
- Regularly audit your website: Review all the backlinks on your website and identify any bad links.
- Remove bad links: Remove any links from your website that look spammy or come from low-quality websites. Put more emphasis on finding authoritative sources that you can link to from your pages.
- Improve content quality: Your content should be relevant and valuable to search engines. Conduct audits of your content and update any content that is outdated. Avoid keyword stuffing because search engines will penalize you.
- Improve on-page SEO: You can improve your SEO by optimizing meta tags, headings, and page content. Improving page loading speed and mobile responsiveness also improves your SEO score.
- Secure your website: You can take several steps to secure your site. One of them is to use HTTPS, which encrypts data transmitted between a browser and your website. Obtaining a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate is also a basic security measure you should take.
