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Thanks for the question! Just to clarify, when say "references" do you mean that someone has mentioned your blog, or that someone has linked to you? Actual links to your blog will be more valuable for ranking purposes than just mentions. You can learn more about the benefits of link building here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/links-link-building For link data, our index updates daily. Moz crawls and indexes billions of pages, adding fresh link data every day. When discovered or lost links are found, we'll update our database to reflect those changes in your scores and link counts. We prioritize the links we crawl based on a machine learning algorithm to mimic Google's index. Unfortunately because it is run by an algorithm, we can't say for certain when a particular link will appear in our index. You can read more about our index here. Hope that helps!

Hi there, Jo from the Moz help team here. You're right that Spam Score is based on the 27 factors outlined on our Help Hub. Spam Score represents the percentage of sites with similar features we've found to be penalized or banned by Google. Spam Score is based on our machine learning model which identified 27 common features among the millions of banned or penalized sites in the data we fed it. Which of the 27 features your site triggered isn't currently available. You'll need to look at the 27 features listed in this article and review your own site to see what you could change to improve your site's score. I hope this helps! Jo