Spam Score and You

[HashtagHustler]

Hey everybody!

Looking for a few opinions on this. I am working with a site that has some backlinks with extremely high spam scores, all the way up to 86%. I have ran these through screaming frog and A LOT of them are 404's, or even 301. So obviously if they are 404's then I don't need to worry about them as much. They will sort themselves out.

But what about all these other ones with a 25% and higher spam score? A lot of them also do not have SSL and are obv insecure. I would presume google doesn't like backlinks from sites that are not secure. Thoughts?

[jasongmcmahon]

Hi there, personally I only ever worry about SPAM scores over 80%, I don't consider SSL as an issue; especially for older links.

[effectdigital]

Only very high spam scores should really worry you, and even then only as an indicator which compels you to check through some of them

"I have ran these through screaming frog and A LOT of them are 404's, or even 301. So obviously if they are 404's then I don't need to worry about them as much. They will sort themselves out." - mmmmm somewhat true, somewhat not true. Servers can actually serve different status codes, to requests from different IP ranges, geographic locations (or even to certain user-agents / web browsers). Might be safe to run those ones again if you are using Screaming Frog default user agent and try from 1-2 other residential IP addresses (just to be certain you aren't being fibbed to). Another thing, sometimes horrible scraper sites move the link they have to you, around an array of pages over time, so just because that one's gone it doesn't mean another hasn't popped up elsewhere on the site to replace it (some links are transient). Just remember that

Google would care more if you were linking out to insecure content (thereby spreading the insecure footprint of the web). Inbound links from insecure aren't always a big deal, but it can be a 'signal' of crappy, spammy sites. A lot of YMYL (Your Money Your Life, e.g: experimental untested medical procedures, illegal gambling sites) - are on HTTP rather than HTTPS, because they're mostly built by con-artists who love to cut corners. Links from sites like that aren't great

[HashtagHustler]

Do you have a rule of thumb? Check anything over 50% and then disavow anything over 70% etc. Obv there are exceptions but just looking for some guidelines

[effectdigital]

I'm with Joe on the over 80% rule myself

[HashtagHustler]

ty both!

[Sjani11]

How the spam score works on blog type website? Some of my pages and blog post have hight spam score then main domain.