Spam Score Help Needed!

[rawdog]

Hi guys,

Basically, long story short our site currently has a spam score of 5%, which is heading into dangerous territory. We have been looking into why this might be and the more we've looked into it the more stumped we've become.

We compared our inbound links to our competitors, who's spam score currently stands at just 1%, and found that we actually had a smaller proportion of spammy inbound links compared to theirs - and yet our score is 5x higher. We have looked into disavowal, but this seems like a high-risk venture and something of a last resort so we'd rather see if there's anything else we can do about this before we press the button.

Are there any other factors we need to look in to aside from inbound links and domains? Could it be something to do with our site architecture? For example we have a very high number of internal links (102,011, 94.1% are followed) compared to our competitors. This could qualify us as a 'large' site, and when paired with the fact that we only have 640 inbound links could be a big red flag to Google?

Any help you'd be willing to provide us on this would be much appreciated!

[jocameron]

Hi there,

Jo from the Moz help team here.

First off, it's worth noting that 5% is quite a low score. Secondly, I would clarify that the score isn't a calculation based on the Spam Score of sites linking to your site.

Spam Score is percentage of sites with similar features we've found to be penalized or banned by Google. To improve this score I would recommend understanding the 27 factors used to make up this score  and working on improving them: https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score
I hope this helps - let me know if there's anything else I can assist with!

Jo