Spam Score
Spam score is a third-party metric (most associated with Moz) that estimates the likelihood a website exhibits characteristics common to sites that have been penalized or banned by search engines — based on features like thin content, excessive ads, or an unusually manipulative link profile.
Updated
November 12, 2026
Category
SEO Glossary
Spam score is built from a checklist of statistically correlated red flags (extremely high ad density, thin content-to-link ratio, patterns common among sites that have historically been penalized) rather than any confirmed knowledge of Google's actual spam-detection criteria, making it a rough, heuristic screening tool rather than a definitive verdict on whether a site is genuinely spammy or actually penalized. It's most practically used during link-prospecting and outreach — quickly filtering a large list of potential link targets to deprioritize sites with an unusually high spam score before investing time in manual, deeper review of the remaining, lower-risk candidates.
Example
A link-building team uses spam score to filter an initial prospect list of 300 sites down to 180 worth manually reviewing, deprioritizing the sites flagged with the highest heuristic risk factors first.
Related terms
Related Reading
404 Error
A 404 error is the standard HTTP status code returned when a requested page doesn't exist on the server — the classic 'page not found' response.
A/B Testing (SEO)
A/B testing in SEO is the practice of showing two versions of a page element — usually a title tag, meta description, or on-page element — to see which one earns a better click-through rate or ranking outcome.
AI Citation
An AI citation happens when an AI assistant like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini references or links to a specific page as the source for part of its answer.
