Google Confirms It’s Okay To Ignore Spam Scores

SEO

By Chris Barnhart Last updated Sep 5, 2024

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Google’s John Mueller answered a Reddit question about how to lower a website’s spam score. His answer reflected an important insight about third-party spam scores and their relation to how Google ranks websites.

What’s A Spam Score?

A spam score is the opinion of a third-party tool that reviews data like inbound links and on page factors based on whatever the tool developers believe are spam-related factors and signals. While there are a few things about SEO that most people can agree on there is a lot more about SEO that digital marketers dispute.

The reality is that third-party tools use unknown factors to assign a spam score, which reflects how a search engine might use unknown metrics to assess website quality. That’s multiple layers of uncertainty to trust.

Should You Worry About Spam Scores?

The question asked in Reddit was about whether they should be worrying about a third-party spam score and what can be done to achieve a better score.

This is the question:

“My site is less than 6 months old with less than 60 blog posts.

I was checking with some tool it says I have 302 links and 52 referring domains. My worry is on the spam score.

How should I go about reducing the score or how much is the bad spam score?”

Google’s John Mueller answered:

“I wouldn’t worry about that spam score.

The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.”

He then followed up with a more detailed response:

“And to be more direct – Google doesn’t use these spam scores. You can do what you want with them. They’re not going to change anything for your site.

I’d recommend taking the time and instead making a tiny part of your website truly awesome, and then working out what it would take the make the rest of your website like that. This spam score tells you nothing in that regard. Ignore it.”

Spam Scores Tells You Nothing In That Regard

John Mueller is right, third-party spam scores don’t reflect site quality. They’re only opinions based on what the developers of a tool believe, which could be outdated, could be insufficient, we just don’t know because the factors used to calculate third-party spam scores are secret.

In any case, there is no agreement about what ranking factors are, no agreement of what on-page and off-page factors are and even the idea of “ranking factors” is somewhat debatable because nowadays Google uses various signals to determine if a site is trustworthy and relies on core topicality systems to understand search queries and web pages. That’s a world-away from using ranking factors to score web pages. Can we even agree on whether there’s a difference between ranking factors and signals? Where does something like a (missing) quality signal even fit in a third-party spam metric?

Popular lists of 200 ranking factors often contain factual errors and outdated ideas based on decades-old concepts of how search engines rank websites. We’re in a period of time when search engines are somewhat moving past the concepts of “ranking factors” in favor of  core topicality systems for understanding web pages (and search queries) and an AI system called SpamBrain that weeds out low-quality websites.

So yes, Mueller makes a valid point when he advises not to worry about spam scores.

Read the discussion on Reddit: