Spam Score.

Spam Score is a Moz proprietary metric (scale 0-17) that estimates the likelihood that a domain shares features with sites that have been penalised or banned by Google. It is based on machine learning analysis of 17 on-site and linking features common to penalised sites. Spam Score is not a direct Google signal — it is a third-party proxy for spam risk.

What Spam Score Measures

Moz's Spam Score model identifies patterns like: low domain authority combined with high numbers of exact-match anchor text links, thin content across many pages, suspicious link patterns, thin or low-quality site construction, and other signals correlated with historically penalised domains. A score of 1-30% (low), 31-60% (medium), 61-100% (high) is more often used as a percentage form.

Using Spam Score in Link Audits

Spam Score is a useful triage tool in backlink audits: links from domains with a high Spam Score are candidates for outreach or disavow consideration. However, Spam Score is not infallible — false positives occur, and a high Spam Score site may still pass genuine PageRank if it has legitimate editorial content. Always manually verify before disavowing based on Spam Score alone.

Limitations

Spam Score reflects historical algorithmic patterns, not Google's current real-time spam evaluation. A site with a high Spam Score may have improved its quality; a site with a low Spam Score may still be in a link scheme not yet captured in Moz's model. Use it as one signal among several in a link evaluation, not as the sole criterion for disavow decisions.