“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.”
Related: Google: Improving 3rd Party Metrics Won’t Boost Rankings
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 They’re only opinions based on what the developers of a tool believe, which could be outdated, could be insufficient, we just don’t know because the factors used to calculate third-party spam scores are secret.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Popular lists of 200 ranking factors often contain factual errors and outdated ideas based on decades-old concepts of how search engines rank websites.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.
See also: No, These 15 Things Are Not Ranking Factors for Google
Read the discussion on Reddit:
Is site spam score of 1% bad?
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