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High Spam Score on Moz

by IceFlok
19 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hello.

I have an e-commerce and recently checked that my Spam Score on MOZ is 7/17. At Open Site Explorer from MOZ it gives me the following info:

7 Total Flag Spam including:
- Low MozTrust or MozRank score
- Large Site with Few Links
- Ratio of Followed to NoFollowed Subdomains

Well, my Spam Score increased a lot with no reason (at least for me).

I will describe some actions that I currently do:

- I have a blog too where I post exclusive content about the niche of my e-commerce and I often link a keyword to my store;
- Almost every product has Link Juice and also SEO optimized description;
- Have some backlinks from others blogs from the same niche.

Starting from the information that MOZ gave me, I've found that 180 backlinks from my store, just 2% are NoFollow.

Can you help me with some advices and tips to decrease that Spam Score? Do I have to care about using more No Follow links, even in my blog that is a subdomain of my store?

Thanks in advance!
#high #moz #score #spam
  • Profile picture of the author cbpayne
    Why? Its not a metric that Google or any other search engine uses.
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  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    Worrying about a useless DIY metric that does nothing.
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  • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
    Originally Posted by IceFlok View Post

    Hello.

    I have an e-commerce and recently checked that my Spam Score on MOZ is 7/17. At Open Site Explorer from MOZ it gives me the following info:

    7 Total Flag Spam including:
    - Low MozTrust or MozRank score
    You are doing the right thing and using the metric as reason to look into it (no harm no foul). Its not whether a metric is used by google or not that is important - its what that metric MIGHT be saying about reality. IF we had any metric from Google then you would of course go with google but everything now is hidden on their side metric wise so we use what we have - Majestic ,Moz and ahrefs

    High spam scores from Moz or majestic can and do often indicate a real problem with a site. Sometimes its right and yeah sometimes its wrong.

    Its a rare rare rare occasion when all the metrics from ahrefs, majestic and moz are saying a domain is weak that you will find its actually a very strong domain with google.

    I do think linking constantly from a blog has diminishing value. If you check most serps you will see Google either rewards getting links on VERY strong sites or strong sites with diversity.
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    • Profile picture of the author IceFlok
      Do you think that I must revise all the old posts from the blog and start removing some links or just not keep the constantly linking from now on?

      Your answer was really helpful! Thanks!
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  • Profile picture of the author jamie3000
    Don't worry about that. If you have a healthy backlink profile and decent (no thin) content then you'll be fine.
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    • Profile picture of the author IceFlok
      Unfortunately I do not own a premium account on both MOZ and others SEO platforms. Although, mostly of the links are from partnerships that were made by us, so are all good sites (we used MOZ to find their DA, PA and also Spam Score before giving the permission to use the link).

      Our content is around 500 words per post, because we did a research on our personas and found that this was the best amount of words because of the time that our viewers can spend reading.

      Thanks for your help.
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  • Profile picture of the author Swapnil Tiwari
    Though there won't be any problem SEO wise.
    It just may be the case that organic viewers find your content fishy!
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    • Profile picture of the author cbpayne
      Originally Posted by Swapnil Tiwari View Post

      It just may be the case that organic viewers find your content fishy!
      Clueless. Do you even know how MOZ calculate to Spam Score?
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    • Profile picture of the author IceFlok
      Our content is 100% original (in terms of plagiarism). Of course there are plenty sites and blogs talking about que same subject, but we try to extract the best content from the most viewed articles and of course, add more info than those others sites.

      There is a way to check if our content is being considered fishy or at least "not high quality" for Google and also viewers?

      Thanks.
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  • Profile picture of the author FNIvan1243
    I think you have only one blog is problem
    TRY 4 or 5 blog or check again your backlink
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    • Profile picture of the author IceFlok
      Yes, FNIvan!

      As our budget for partnerships went to 0, we weren't able to expand our backlink diversity. But now with this data I convinced my directors and I am already looking for good blogs to build a strong backlink strategy.

      I found this on Majestic a graph that showed how we went almost to 0 with backlinks from others blogs.
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      • Profile picture of the author FNIvan1243
        Haha, Hope you success and share your experience in the future
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        • Profile picture of the author IceFlok
          Hi! Thanks!

          When I solve this problem will come back to help more people!
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  • Profile picture of the author TrafficQueen
    Banned
    Hmm i would not worry too much providing you have decent content and your backlink profile is in order.
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    • Profile picture of the author IceFlok
      I am not that worried, but I want to have a decent Spam Score because many other sites look at this data and decide if we are worthy to build links.

      Our rankings didn't had any changes and I know that all we do is legal. But is a good information that shows that we need more diversity on backlinks to be a stronger player on the niche.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tony Marriott
    Extract from Moz Spam Score Article

    These are relevant to your flags noted above:
    • Low mozTrust to mozRank ratio: Sites with low mozTrust compared to mozRank are likely to be spam.
    • Large site with few links: Large sites with many pages tend to also have many links and large sites without a corresponding large number of links are likely to be spam.
    • Ratio of followed to nofollowed subdomains/domains (two separate flags): Sites with a large number of followed links relative to nofollowed are likely to be spam.

    These are all link flags. From that it is likely that you have a low number of low quality links that are mainly do follow.

    This is a typical profile of a site that is manually finding and adding backlinks. Which I think is what you are doing.

    Your link profile needs to be much more natural. So either let it happen naturally or do a better job of manually adding links.

    You said you have 7/17 spam score but you don't mention the other 4. I'm guessing more link flags but may also have on-page flags.

    If so they will need addressing as well.

    For full details of the Moz spam flags see
    https://moz.com/blog/spam-score-mozs...alization-risk

    Also you state "I've found that 180 backlinks from my store". Do you mean links pointing to your store. The details above really only refer to inbound links.
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    • Profile picture of the author IceFlok
      Hi, Tony!

      Below are further informations for you:

      - Unfortunately I don't have a Premium Account on MOZ, so I can't see the other flags.

      - Data found using Majestic:
      Backlinks: 10.925 (do not know if it's considering the Deleted ones)
      Ref Domains: 150
      Trust Flow: 3
      Citation Flow: 25

      - We are currently creating inbound backlinks on our blog. For example: we create a post "the benefits of using x". X is a product that we sell and then we write all the qualities and other features about X and then we link our category page and the product link (the category page is the one in the store) on some keywords.
      Until late November, we were sending products to bloggers and then they used it and wrote a review talking a little bit more and of course, the content had a keyword with a link to our store.

      Hope this helps your analysis.
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      • Profile picture of the author Tony Marriott
        From the first Moz spam references my guess is the main issue is links. Most of the additional flags will almost certainly be mainly link related.

        I would check Moz open site explorer and see what they have in the way of links as that is the data they will be using. So although Majestic may be useful you need to check Moz specifically. They may have different view of your site.

        But looking at your Majestic stats I would say that you seem to have a lot of backlinks but very few linking root domains.

        Your backlink numbers will always be more than your domains as sites will often have multiple links back to you but you don't want the to be excessive.

        Huge amounts of links from individual domains can mean 'site wide links' i.e. those not in content (in navigation bars, footers etc) which may indicate poor quality links. Or worse link manipulation.

        Your trust citation ration is pretty poor (sorry). Again indicative of a lot of low quality links


        "the main thing to remember is that Citation Flow is link juice and the Trust Flow is how close those links are to trustworthy, authoritative sources.

        To get the Trust Ratio you simply do the following calculation: Trust Flow / Citation Flow = Trust Ratio

        The basics behind why the trust ratio works is because, if the Citation Flow is high and the Trust Flow is low, this means that the website being checked has a lot of link equity (or "juice"), but barely any trust from those links. This usually indicates that the site has gained those links from "spammy" areas of the web as they are not close to authoritative sources.

        On the flip side of this, if a site has a high amount of Trust Flow and low Citation Flow this means that the links pointing to that site are from very trustworthy sources .i.e. a trustworthy site that you want a link from."

        Good to get bloggers linking to your store but their blogs need to be authoritative and good quality.

        If you are sending massive amounts of links FROM your store (each product) TO your blog you are probably not improving your blog authority (links from same domain) and may be dramatically leaching 'link juice' from your store.

        Consider why are you linking your store to your blog? authority/traffic? not sure? It is worth considering using No Follow links from your store to the blog to ensure traffic flow (if that's your objective) but not link juice flow.

        Or do you even need so many links back to your blog. You really want the traffic to flow from your blog to your store as that's where the money is.

        In short it looks like you have a significant number of low quality links. Improve your link quality and domain diversity in your link building going forward. It is your only sensible solution

        Simply creating bi-directional links between your blog and your store will not work as a link building strategy. It is likely to be seen as 'reciprocal linking' by Google and ignored anyway. i.e. reciprocal links will cancel each other out.
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        • Profile picture of the author IceFlok
          Hi, Tony! I do not have words to thanks your help! This answer is amazing and of course it will help me bringing my Spam Score to almost 0.

          Will explain how the blog works for us: we develop high quality content for our target personas about a subject that has relevance in our niche. In the posts, we expose some products (a image of the product plus more related info) with a link directly to the product on our store or we link the store or some category of product's page in some keyword (this keyword we want a higher ranking for the store so that's why we link it).

          We do not have links to the blog in our store, but we have links on our blog that sends the user to the store.

          I've made this image to help a better understanding:



          The main objective of the blog is generate traffic and improve the authority of our store.

          The Link Juice I've said is this (here, everything is at the store): we have the product description and there we link a word to the product's category page. For example: you are in a Spider-Man T-Shirt page. In the description we have a sentence inviting the user to check our Super-Heroes T-Shirts pages. This sentence has a link to send the user to Super-Heroes T-Shirts page.

          About the side links, almost all partnerships that we did were this way. The blogger just links a keyword in their sidebar. So do you think that is better I leave this strategy and just focus in backlinks from posts like reviews, etc?

          About the links of store's products and pages in the blog, is it better I change them to No Follow?

          Please, if something isn't well explained, just ask. English is not my first language, so sorry if something is written wrong.

          Thanks again!
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