What is Spam Score, and how is it calculated?

Spam Score is a way of checking how likely it is that a website (or page) is low-quality or suspicious in the eyes of search engines like Google.

Why does that matter? If other websites are linking to yours, and those sites look shady or spammy, it can harm your chances of showing up in Google search results.

SEOSpace now includes Spam Score in your backlink report, so you can quickly see if any links to your website could be putting your SEO at risk.

👉 Check your backlinks here

Why you should care about Spam Score

Search engines look at who’s linking to you when deciding how trustworthy your site is. If you’ve got links coming from sites that look like spam—or follow patterns that are common in spammy websites—it can hurt your rankings.

In some cases, Google might even apply a manual action. That’s when a real person at Google reviews your site and decides it breaks the rules. If that happens, your site could drop in rankings or even disappear from search results completely.

Spam Score helps you spot risky links before things get to that point.

What the numbers mean

Spam Score is shown as a percentage:

0% to 30% — Low risk
31% to 60% — Medium risk
61% to 100% — High risk

The higher the number, the more red flags the page or site has.

What affects Spam Score?

Spam Score is based on 18 different checks. Each one either increases or lowers the score depending on whether the page looks suspicious or trustworthy.

Here’s a full list of what’s checked and how each thing affects the score:

What We Look At	How It Affects the Score
Website URL is really short (under 3 characters) or very long (over 20)	+10%
The main part of the website URL includes 2 or more numbers	+15%
The subdomain (the part before the main website name) includes 2 or more numbers	+20%
The website ends in an extension that’s often linked to spam, like `.biz`, `.top`, `.xyz`, or `.surf` instead of more reputable extensions, like `.com`, `.co`, `.org`, or `.co.uk`	+20%
The page doesn’t include code from trusted platforms (like Google, Bing, Facebook, Twitter) in its header	+20%
The page includes code from trusted platforms (like Google, Bing, Facebook, or Twitter) in the header	Take off 5% for each one
The page includes social sharing tags (like for Facebook or Twitter)	-15%
The page lists contact info (email, phone, address)	-20%
The page uses a “rel=canonical” tag that points to another website (instead of itself)	+20%
The site uses regular HTTP instead of secure HTTPS	+30%
There’s no page title, or the title is way too short or too long	+5%
The title is the right length (between 40–60 characters)	-5%
There’s no page description, or it’s too short or too long	+5%
The description is a good length (between 40–200 characters)	-5%
The page uses the old-fashioned “meta keywords” tag with more than 10 keywords	+15%
The page has over 100 links to other websites	+20%
The page has over 500 links to other pages on its own site	+15%
There are way more links to outside websites than to its own pages (more than 3 to 1)	+15%

What about the whole website?

When we’re calculating the Spam Score for an entire website or a group of pages, we take the average score of all the individual pages.

So, if five pages on a site have scores of 10%, 30%, 40%, 50%, and 80%, the website’s overall score would be:

(10 + 30 + 40 + 50 + 80) ÷ 5 = 42%

That would count as a medium Spam Score.

What to do if you find spammy links

If you notice some backlinks to your site with high Spam Scores, don’t stress—but don’t ignore them either.

Here’s what you can do:

Check the site – Visit the link. Does it look like a real, useful website? Or does it feel off?
Ask for removal – If it’s a dodgy site, you can email the site owner and ask them to remove the link.
Use Google’s disavow tool – If you’ve got a bunch of spammy links, or if Google has sent you a manual action warning, you can ask Google to ignore those links.

Here’s a step-by-step guide from Google:

👉 How to disavow links

You don’t need to disavow links often—Google is pretty good at spotting spam on its own. But it’s good to know you have that option.

Conclusion

Spam Score is your heads-up for bad backlinks. It shows you which links might be working against you, so you can keep your site clean and your rankings safe.

Check your Spam Score today in the SEOSpace Backlink Tool.