80% Spam Score!! Can Any One Help?

[PoppyP]

I have a question about the Spam Score for my website .
I have run a Spam Score for https://www.poppyporter.co.uk
It has come back with an 80% score because there are 4 links that are apparently from my poppyporter.com domain each with a 69% spam score.
This poppyporter.com domain is parked and I have no idea why there are links from it. There are no pages there and there never have been, I've never used the poppyporter.com domain only poppyporter.co.uk.
I don't understand why there are links there and why they are making my Spam Score so high.
Will they affect my site's SEO? Do I need to worry about them? If so how do I get rid of them?
Can you help?
Thanks very much

Poppy

[zeehj]

Hey Poppy–sorry you're dealing with this!

Your spam score likely has nothing to do with your .com site. I checked, and you have your .com URL 301 redirecting to your .co.uk site (which is likely a good thing, if you want all your traffic to be served through your .co.uk). It sounds like your site might be due for a backlinks audit (to rid your site of suspicious or spammy links pointing to your site) and a technical audit (to clean up any places where you might have linked to the .com version of your site internally).

Hope this all makes sense. Here to help if you have follow up questions!

[effectdigital]

Hi there Poppy!

For my own benefit and for the benefit of others who may wish to look at helping you solve this, just going to pop the spam results URL here:

• https://analytics.moz.com/pro/link-explorer/spam-score?site=poppyporter.co.uk&target=domain

This is the spam score which is worrying you:

• https://d.pr/i/wl6Dz0.png

And these are the links which Moz thinks are bad:

• https://d.pr/i/tNjbse.png

These are the notes from Moz on why linking sites and / or pages get higher spam flags:

• https://d.pr/i/SDKfmc.png

Basically if Moz identifies that a linking site shares common features with other sites that have factually gained Google penalties, then links from those site will raise the spam score higher and higher. For some reason Moz seems to think that Poppyporter.com fits that pattern, hence the high spam scores for those four links

These are the URLs for the offending web pages:

• https://www.poppyporter.com/racing_wings_earrings.html
• https://www.poppyporter.com/two_finger_ring.html
• https://www.poppyporter.com/large_ring_disc_model.html
• https://www.poppyporter.com/large_connections.html

If you visit those URLs, you will see that the site is not in fact parked at all. Although those pages all result in error 404s, if the site were really taken down - how come the Poppy Porter logo and branding are still there? How come featured products are still listed? If the site were parked and taken down, it wouldn't have your stuff still on it. Clearly it does and it is not parked (hence the custom 404 pages are still rendering)

If your site were really parked, the 404s would look like this instead:

• https://d.pr/i/Qqtojd.png

It would be a blank white page with no branded styling. Nothing except for the server's response! The fact that it's still all styled, shows that your old site is still online. Individual pages may have been taken down, but at large that site still exists

Interestingly, if you click any link on your old site, it moves you to the new site

Let's look at one of the 404 pages on your old site, which does not redirect to your new site and is still live:

• https://www.poppyporter.com/racing_wings_earrings.html

As you can see, there's no redirect to the new site:

• https://d.pr/i/gJ7uKT.png

If we look at the source code of a live (but 404-ing) page on poppyporter.com (say if we examine the shop link in the top-line nav):

• https://d.pr/i/dwdVut.png

You can see very clearly that, you have two sites live and one is linking to the other!

I'm not a betting man and I don't have loads of info available, but if I _were _a betting man I'd say, this is what has happened:

1. You didn't shut down your old site properly, leading to a 'broken' old site with loads of 404s and broken styling
2. You tried to 'point' your old site to your new site with some kind of link architecture update, maybe in the DB or CMS
3. Moz saw that the old site was all janky and broken with loads of broken looking and 404-ing pages
4. Moz gave your old site a higher spam score than it used to have because now it's all bork'd (broken)
5. But there are links from the old site to the new site
6. So now your new site is inheriting the negative spam scores generated by the botched move from old site to new
7. It's possible that the old site had legitimately high spam scores, but I can't say for certain. Certainly after this botched attempt to move across, you have ended up with a spammy looking (and acting, in terms of status codes) old site. Because of the links, those negative scores are being pushed from the old site to the new one
8. As stated I don't know if the old site had high spam scores prior to the botched move and you need to investigate that with some urgency, as it will entirely shape your next movements
9. If the old site was very spammy and you were trying to make a 'clean break', you have undone that by interlinking the old site with the new one. Certainly you'd want to perma-kill the old domain as a matter of urgency! Kill the links, kill the pages that are still up, do not redirect from old site to new etc.
10. If the old site had good metrics before the botched move, you want to replace all the links and live-URLs with 301 redirects. Only do this if you are certain that Google hadn't penalised the old site. This can be a bit of a technical thing to do

Anyway the long and the short of it is, yes your old site is still live - yes it is linking excessively to your new site! One way or the other, it needs sorting out...

[effectdigital]

FYI!

Only her homepage 301s to her new site.

Some of her deep-link 404-ing URLs do not 301, and those are the ones which Moz picked up:

https://www.poppyporter.com/racing_wings_earrings.html

If you load the above URL, you will notice that in the URL bar it **does not **change to .co.uk. The 301 is homepage (or maybe 'key-page') level only

The domain is in fact, not parked and still hosts custom 404 pages and other content :')

[meghanpahinui]

Hi Poppy!

Thanks so much for the great question and I'm so sorry for all the confusion here. When looking at your Spam Score it can help to understand how we calculate it- our machine learning model identified 27 common features among different sites which have been penalized and/or banned by Google. (I have more info about these features outlined in our Help Hub here: https://moz.com/help/link-explorer/link-building/spam-score) So when it comes to the Spam Score for your site, it doesn't necessarily indicate that your site is spammy. We suggest using Spam Score as a place to start investigating your inbound links and your site itself. If you're wanting to improve your Spam Score, I would recommend looking into those 27 features and see how they may be impacting your site and its overall score.

I hope this helps to clarify more! If you have further questions or if you need anything else, feel free to email us at help@moz.com

[PoppyP]

Hi there effectdigital

Thank you so much for taking the time to respond to my question, much appreciated.

I have only ever used the .co.uk. domain. The .com has always just been a parked domain name I own that has always redirected to the .co.uk. I have never hosted any content on the .com so I am mystified as to why these links appear.

With regard to your point 2. I have moved my website and by moved I mean, killed the old one and rebuilt a totally new one. No link architecture update or anything like that. There should be no links to the old site, even if there were they would be .co.uk ones.

As for spam scores on the old site I never collected that data. I only just joined Moz!

I think the only thing I can do is follow your point 10 and redirect them.

Thanks again

Poppy