What is a Spammy Website? How Many Spam Factors Does Your Website Have?
In the last couple of months Open Site Explorer released a new Spam Score Metric as a way to evaluate your backlink profile and measure penalization risk for unnatural backlinks.
The original purpose of the tool is to check spammy backlinks to your website, evaluate potential links, conduct link cleanup and help with disavowing files in Google Webmaster Tools.
However we think you should also look at the Open Site Explorer Spam Score metrics to review your own website for spam factors that you may or may not realize are even affecting your website.
How does your website compare to what Moz, Open Site Explorer and Google would consider a “spam” site?
| Spam Factor | Ratio* | Reason |
|---|---|---|
| No Contact Info | 11.8 | Quality websites and real businesses have prominent contact information such as email, social profiles, and addresses. |
| Small proportion of branded links | 8.5 | The natural way for websites to link to you are through branded anchor text, not keyword rich anchor text. |
| Domain name with numerals | 7.5 | Spam websites often include multiple numbers because the domain names are automatically generated. |
| Large site with few links | 5.7 | Large quality websites will naturally attract a large number of links to it. |
| Low number of pages | 5.5 | Quality sites tend to have more pages than just one or two. |
| Low number of internal links | 4.9 | Quality websites will link heavily to other related pages on the site through navigation or content links, unlike spammy websites that are more likely to link to external websites. |
| Domain name length | 4.9 | Spammy websites often have very long domain names to accommodate keyword stuffing or differentiate from other related, equally spammy domains. |
| Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed domains | 4.6 | Quality sites will have a good balance of both Follow and Nofollow links, not just Follow links. |
| Thin Content | 3.9 | Quality websites will have balanced ratio of page specific content to navigational content. |
| Anchor text heavy page | 3.9 | Quality websites tend to have more content and less outgoing links and anchor text. |
| External links in navigation | 2.8 | Quality websites tend to have a navigation, sidebar and footer with links to pages on the site, unlike spammy sites that have external spam links on website’s navigation. |
| Low site link diversity | 2.6 | Quality sites will have a wide diversity of links from a number of different domains. |
| Large number of external links | 2.6 | Quality websites often have fewer links going out to other websites, unlike spammy websites that link heavily to other sites. |
| Top Level Domain associated with spam domains | 2.4 | Quality websites are not associated with spammy domains. |
| Site mark-up is abnormally small | 1.3 | Quality websites will invest in both content and rich markup like HTML, JavaScript, etc, to improve user experience. |
* Example: 5.7 means websites with this are 5.7x more likely to be spam than a site without it.
What’s your spam website tolerance?
The makers of the tool have actually calculated the probability of spam based on the number of flags your site might trigger:
- 0-4 factors: less than 7.5% chance of spam
- 5 – 7 factors: 11.4 – 30.6% chance of spam
- 8 – 10 factors: 56.8 – 77.3% chance of spam
- 11 – 13 factors: 87.3 – 98% chance of spam
- 14+ factors: 100% chance of spam
How to tell if a website is spam? If your website has more than 8 factors there is a good chance that Google could be viewing your website as spam. Fewer factors could still be hurting your website’s quality and trust score, and as a result, your rankings.
Don’t Get Labeled as a Spammy Website!
If you have read through the above list of factors and think you could potentially be considered a spammy website give us a call at 1-888-262-6887. We offer full SEO Website Audits that include a thorough analysis of your website and recommendations on how to improve your website so that Google moves from ranking it as a spam site to a quality website.