Spam Score

[Kingalan1]

My site has a spam score of 2/17. How bad is this?

Domain authority is 23 and page authority is 32. The domain is www.nyc-officespace-leader.com.

In total, according to MOZ, there are 38 inbound links. Spam scores for the inbound links are as follows:

1 (8)
1 (6)
2 (5)
2 (4)
3 (3)
16 (2)
4 (1)
8 (0)

The number in the parentheses represents spam score.

Does it make sense to get some of these links removed? Is it necessary for me to remove links from all sites with a spam score of 5,6,7,8?

If we remove these lower quality links will Domain Authority and Page Authority improve?

Thanks, Alan

[RossM]

2/17 isn't bad I think that's less than a 5 percent chance of having any Google problems. What those flags are is more important. Rand has said a few times that the flags are not suggestions to fix something. They are simply correlations. Many of the flags can not be avoided for some sites. I wouldn't worry about a 2/17 score. Look at what the flags are and if they are things you can change and feel you should then do it.

As far as removing links goes, these flags can be a good indicator for further investigation in my opinion. I personally am going to investigate sites that have 5 or more but the final decision will be based on my normal link evaluations. Does the link link with spammy sites, does it hold any relevance to my site, does it drive desired traffic to my site, does it help or hurt my brand, does it exist only to create links, etc. etc. I would not advise saying well any links that have over 5 or 8 flags I am now going to get rid of or disavow. Use it as an indicator and then do good research on the suspect sites.

I can't speak to PA and DA impact as I am not sure if spam score is being included into those at this time. My understanding is that they are not. If they are really poor links then get rid of them regardless of PA and DA. Where you have a low amount of links then I would say yes a single poor link could have a greater impact on your ranking than it would on a site with thousands of links. That's all just my 2 cents though.

[randfish]

Hi Kingalan - first off, I'd recommend checking out http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday which will give you a pretty good overview of what Spam Score is and how it works.

I wouldn't worry about firing two flags - Moz triggers a few, and many good sites do as well. If they're things you want to fix anyway, go for it, but Spam Score flags aren't about saying "this is necessarily bad" or "this definitely needs fixing." It's merely identifying features that, when added together, show correlations with sites we saw Google penalize/ban.

As far as your links go - that distribution seems fine to me, too. If you want, you could look at the highest flag count links and if you believe they're problematic after manually reviewing, go ahead and give them the boot (via disavow or getting the site to remove them). The flag count is merely to help you order your manual review - it should never replace the process of actually looking at those links and determining which should be kept/removed.