Over the past few years, making sure that your site is spam free and not associated with other spammy sites has become more and more important as Google gets better at measuring the quality of a site. Today we look at a quick check that you can do yourself to see if your site is at risk of penalisation by Google.
Pandas and Penguins
It all started with the Panda Update, back in 2011 which started to punish websites that have low-quality content. This was soon followed in 2012 by the Penguin Update that punished websites that create spammy links to get a better place in Google.
The message from Google? Don't try to fool us.
If your website gets a significant amount of traffic from Google, it is extremely important that you know whether your site is at risk of penalisation.
Black-hat SEO
If you are working with an SEO agency, or have done in the past, ask yourself the question: "Do I know what they are doing now and what they have done in the past?"
Some agencies, especially in the past, used techniques that went against Google's guidelines as Google was unable to detect these techniques. This was and still is commonly known as "Black-hat SEO".
While most agencies that engaged in these techniques have now cleaned up their act, some of this "black-hat" work may still remain on your site, so it is extremely important that you know where your site stands.
Enter the Moz Spam Score...
Moz, a creator of excellent SEO tools, and something of a trend-setter in the industry, have now released a new metric for their popular Open Site Explorer tool called Spam Score. When Moz were creating the new Spam Score, they looked at 17 factors that they believed could lead to a site being penalised by Google. The more of these factors that your site has, the more likely it is that your site will be, or already has been penalised.
Testing on over 500,000 sites has found that if your site has a score of 0, you have just a 0.5% chance of being penalised, a score of 8 results in a 56.8% chance of being penalised and if you have a score above 14, you will almost certainly be penalised.
The tool is very easy to use, and even if you are not a Moz subscriber you can have a look at what your current Spam score is by visiting Open Site Explorer and typing in your website address.
If you are concerned about your Moz Spam Score, and would like to take actions to improve it, feel free to email me to discuss the options that we can take to reduce the risk of your site being penalised by Google.