Spam Score Checker

Check the spam score of any domain before building links or accepting guest posts. Avoid association with toxic sites that could hurt your SEO.

What you need to know

What spam score measures — Spam Score (by Moz) identifies sites with patterns associated with Google penalties — thin content, manipulative links, or suspicious link profiles.

Check before you accept links — If someone requests a link exchange or guest post, check their spam score first. Accepting links from spammy sites can trigger manual penalties.

Toxic backlinks need disavowing — If you discover high-spam-score sites linking to you, use Google's Disavow tool in Search Console to tell Google to ignore those links.

High spam score ≠ definite penalty — Spam score is a risk indicator, not a verdict. A score of 8/17 isn't automatically harmful, but warrants investigation before building a relationship with that site.

Frequently asked questions

What is spam score?

Spam Score is a Moz metric (0–17) that indicates how many spam-associated features a site has. Higher scores suggest higher risk of being associated with manipulative SEO practices.

What spam score is acceptable?

Scores of 1–4 are low risk, 5–7 are medium risk, 8+ are high risk. Avoid building links to or from sites with a spam score above 7.

Can I remove a spam score from my site?

You can't directly change third-party metrics, but improving your site — better content, cleaner link profile, technical fixes — will lower your score over time as Moz recrawls your site.

Does Google use spam score?

No — spam score is a Moz metric. Google has its own internal spam detection. But sites with high spam scores often have the same problems Google penalises.

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