This week, we launched a feature inside Open Site Explorer that I'm very excited about - the Spam Score Histogram, found by clicking on the "spam analysis" tab:
The histogram is particularly useful for visualizing the distribution of potentially spammy links that show up in a site's link profile. Above, for example, we're looking at Moz.com, with a strong distribution of sites that have 0-5 spam flags. According to our research, that means the vast majority of those sites are unlikely to be penalized or banned by Google.
For more detail on Moz's Spam Score, check out the original blog post and my Whiteboard Friday.
The new histogram view lets us do nice comparisons like these:
Houzz.com has a very large list of sketchy-looking sites linking to them (many seem to be very thin content sites from China, curiously).
Competitor (well, sort-of-competitor), Porch.com, has a much smaller link profile with a very different distribution. Their link profile looks even healthier than Moz's to me!
But, the new spam score histogram isn't the only new feature. We've also got a new power available to API users - the ability to query data from the previous index. If you want to know what a previous Domain Authority score looked like, or how many links we reported to a page in our last index, you can now do so using the Moz API. If you want to get started, check out the documentation here, or get in touch directly with Chris Airola (email chris.airola at moz.com), who manages paid API accounts and loves to help.
Many thanks to the Research Tools and Big Data teams at Moz, who've worked to make this possible. I'm happy to answer questions and will try to be in the comments here frequently. I wish you good spam exploring my friends!
The Spam Score I think one of the best utilities that are available in the SEO scene.
BOOM! Thanks Rand :) This is great stuff! I used to have so much trouble figuring out if my clients' backlinks were spammy.
Happy we can help! Being totally transparent, this tool is great for spotting some potentially spammy links (a lot of the worst ones, anyway), but it will miss many of the more subtle and sophisticated types of spam, e.g. folks selling links from high quality sites, sophisticated link networks that dodge a lot of the known spam indicators, etc.
Mozscape's index also isn't as widespread in coverage as it needs to be (though we do have pretty good breadth coverage across lots of subdomains and root domains), but we're working hard on that. Hope to be back up to competitive coverage size within the next 3-4 indices.
Thanks Rand. I love using your tools to help sell to potential customers. It's one of the main reasons we subscribe to Moz Pro. I can see this new feature being great for helping me quickly and succinctly demonstrate to a potential client that their past backlink strategies were not working and/or harmful.
Great new visual "snapshot" ! This is definitely something I'm going to be checking out and experimenting with in the coming weeks.
There are tons of new features in tow and one is that you can now use histograms to compare elements and sites to one another. This allows you to see what sites are being linked to the site in question which can in turn help you determine if the sit is in fact spam or another type of site. This also allows you to look at sites in terms of their spam score in Google. This comprehensive spam score really helps you to get around spam sites and find sites that are truly worthwhile and worth taking the time to link to and look at.
Love this. What a powerful visual to show prospects when giving them insight about their website...or competitors. Plus having this 'at-a-glance' can give you a quick overview of a website's link profile. The spam score was a great addition to the arsenal...and glad you added it to Moz Bar!
Hey there Rand,
Thanks for bringing this up. This has a lot of potential to begin with. A quick glance and I know our clients would surely love this feature, and I would like to try this out ASAP. I had said this countless of times already but Rand you sure know how to amaze us. Thank you!
It's great to get an overview at a glance, particularly when looking for sites to partner with. Thanks for this. Each metric within the spam score is given equal weighting, i.e. one point, but I have often wondered whether, in your original analysis, you found that some of the metrics were more important than others?
Smart question sir :-) Techincally, the answer's yes, a few of the metrics were slightly more predictive of spam than others. However, that "slightly" was so slight that, when compared to using multiple features together in the count format, it was clear that it didn't make sense to go that direction. For example, Flag A might be more predictive than Flag B, but Flags A+B (or Flags A+D or D+F or B+G for that matter) were much better than either individually.
Thanks for your reply Rand, that answers my question. I suppose that is the way that the Google algorithm works; a combination of many small parts rather than giving a lot of credit to a small number of parameters.
Rand love to hear about this new feature. Formerly we were doing backlink analysis manually, I hope, now it will reduce efforts to manual work.
Hello, Rand, thank you for comprehensive and helpful articles. I have one question for you: does Spam Score is calculated and shown for domain or does MOZ show different Spam Score for each domain's page?
Hi Lina - it's meaured on a subdomain basis, so abc.domain.com vs. xyz.domain.com will have unique spam scores assigned, but xyz.domain.com/page1 vs. xyz.domain.com/page2 will have the same score.
Thank you !
One more question, what exactly changed in MOZ PA / DA ranking so that PA and DA rankings dropped from 53/44 to 51/41?
Hi Lina - check out https://moz.com/community/q/da-pa-fluctuations-how... for more info on those changes.
Open Site Explorer (OSE) has a brand new feature that's sure to provide extra convenience to its users. The feature is called "The Spam Score Histogram." Users can access the feature by simply selecting the tab that reads "spam analysis." The Spam Score Histogram is beneficial for getting an overview of links that are possibly spam. The histogram showcases the varieties of links that appear in link profiles for websites. Moz.com's histogram displays an abundance of websites that are equipped with between 0 and 5 spam flags total. Research indicates that that's a sign that most of those websites have slim odds of being either penalized or banned by search engine Google. The histogram results for Houzz.com, on the other hand, showed an abundance of websites that appear to be potentially disreputable or dishonest in practice. Porch.com was similar to Moz.com in that its histogram seemed to display rather strong site results. Another new feature at OSE is geared toward API users. This feature enables them to question information acquired from their previous indices.
Good content !!, I take weeks using the tool spam score .. I made manual checks in some cases allegedly toxic bonds .and I'm not sure of the reliability of the tool.
I could give several examples of links that detects spam as possible, and they are not at all.
this will be of great help, this has always been my greatest difficulty
Very excited about these new features! Really useful in order to evaluate our actions over time. Many thanks!
My very first post here, In some cases you click on the "spammy" back link and all you get is a 404, so practically you could not get a hold of webmaster of that site to get the link removed, then you report to google, how long of a process will it be usually for google to get those links removed, Thanks!
This is great, Thank Rand
great news. I am wondering how will feel one who is going to show the next report the client. specially if he just got paid for a whitehat link building campaign and instead of whitehat turned to be black!
Thank Rand It is good news. Actually I am always worry about spam link. After reading your post now my mind is clear about it.