Spam Score
Also called: Moz Spam Score, spam score metric
Spam Score is a Moz metric, shown as a 1-100% value, that estimates how closely a domain resembles websites Google has penalized or banned. It is built from 27 machine-learned flags and reflects correlation, not causation. It is not a Google ranking factor.
How the score is built and read
Moz trained a model on millions of domains, comparing sites Google had penalized or banned against clean ones, then reduced the shared traits to 27 flags. Those flags include things like a very long domain name, few internal links, missing contact details, or a thin backlink profile. The final percentage is the share of sites with a similar mix of flags that Moz found had been penalized.
Read it in bands: roughly 1-30% is low, 31-60% warrants a look, and 61% and up is high. Do not treat one number as a verdict. Large, legitimate brands sometimes carry mid-range scores because a few flags correlate with spam without being spam. The metric is correlation, not causation. A domain scoring 55% resembles penalized sites; it has not itself been penalized.
Google does not read Moz’s number. Google’s own systems judge quality, and its guidance on manipulative links is that offending sites “may rank lower in results or not appear in results at all.” Paid or sponsored links stay compliant when tagged with rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow". So Spam Score is best used as a triage filter for backlink and outreach decisions, not as proof of a penalty.
How it affects your traffic
When you audit an existing backlink profile or vet outreach targets, Spam Score works as a fast first-pass filter: links from high-score domains rarely move rankings and can cluster into the manipulative patterns Google's systems act on. Chasing cheap links that raise your referring domains' average Spam Score risks wasted budget and, in bad cases, a link you have to disavow later. Our link building work uses Spam Score alongside manual review of traffic, topical relevance, and anchor patterns, so the domains pointing at you read as earned rather than bought.
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