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.
Related: Google: We Don’t Use Third-Party SEO Tool Scores For Rankings
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: