Mateus Torres
In this week’s Q&A section, we have selected the following topic from our subscriber: “How to Reduce Website Spam Score?”
Question From Timothy J.
“I purchased a domain 5 years ago without consent just because I think the domain name is nice and catchy. After browsing on your site and read about the spam score module, I checked mine and it shown19% spam score. Is there any way that I can reduce my website spam score?”
Hey Timothy!
It’s not common to see a good and catchy domain name that is still available to buy nowadays. There is actually a reason why a good-sounding domain is still available; this is because the previous owner was very likely to be spammers and use the domain to practice black hat SEO practice.
How to Reduce Website Spam Score?
Moz is using 27 signals to determine the spam score of a website.
However, not all are worth fixing since they can do more harm than good. For instance, fixing long URL can make your page lose all the existing backlinks).
Meanwhile, some of the signals are just not possible to fix. For example, domain name length fixing.
With that to say, here are some of the important keys if you want to reduce your website spam score:
Investigate and Remove Any Meta Keywords
You can use Moz’s free chrome extension, MozBar to detect any presence of meta keywords on all the pages on 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.
Once you detect any presence of meta keywords, remove the HTML code from that page and you should repeat this steps on all your pages.
Fix Meta Data Issues
Moz stated page title and meta description that are too long or too short are correlated with spam sites.
You can easily do this by go through all the existing pages and fix the title and meta description to the proper length.
If you’re using WordPress, Yoast Plugin will helps you to help identify those issues.
Start Cleansing Poor External Link and Backlink
Spam sites are more likely to have abnormally high or low unique domains to which they link.
You can start by looking each of the page’s hyperlink and investigate where they linked to. Start removing all the external link that is pointing to a low authority sites.
Similarly, do the same for your backlink profile. Start removing all the toxic backlinks from your site. You can do this easily by using the Ahrefs to investigate and sort the low backlinks that are pointing to you and disavow them on Google Search Console.
Invest in HTTPs
If your site have not using SSL, start investing in one. Having a HTTPs installed in your website is a good trust signal that can determine your spam score.
Remove All The Prohibited Words in All Your Pages
Prohibited words are the words that correlated with gambling, drugs, adult content, tobacco, CBD and etc.
If you found tons of content that containing those words, don’t be surprised if your site’s spam score is high.
Bottom Line
After all, a spam score does not have any impact on your ranking as it is just a third party indicator to measure a site’s spam score from 1 to 100.
However, having a high spam score on your site can drive a negative impression in front of the marketers, clients that might looking for a collaboration.
Normally, none of the marketers would want to invest a backlink on a site that has very high spam score.
Reducing the spam score on your site can open up a future collaboration and profitable deals.