John Mueller from Google advises focusing on creating impactful content rather than worrying about spam scores, which he considers unimportant.

John Mueller of Google responded to a Reddit query about reducing a website’s spam score, offering valuable insight into the relationship between third-party spam scores and Google’s ranking system.

What’s a Spam Score?

A spam score is an assessment provided by third-party tools that analyze data, such as inbound links and on-page elements, based on the criteria the tool developers associate with spam signals. While some aspects of SEO are widely accepted, many remain hotly debated among digital marketers. These third-party tools rely on undisclosed factors to generate a spam score, which mimics the way search engines might use unknown metrics to evaluate a website’s quality. This creates multiple layers of uncertainty, making it a questionable metric.

Should You Worry About Spam Scores?

A Reddit user recently asked whether they should be concerned about a third-party spam score and what could be done to improve it. Here’s the question they posed:

“My site is less than six months old with fewer than 60 blog posts. I checked with a tool, and it says I have 302 links and 52 referring domains. My concern is about the spam score.

How should I reduce it, and what qualifies as a lousy spam score?”

Google’s John Mueller responded:

“I wouldn’t worry about that spam score.

The real troubles in your life will likely be things you never anticipated, the kind that blindside you at 4 p.m. on some idle Tuesday.”

He then elaborated:

“To be more direct—Google doesn’t use these spam scores. You can do what you want with them, but they won’t affect your site.

Instead of focusing on the score, I recommend taking the time to make a small part of your website genuinely outstanding. Then, figure out how to bring that same level of quality to the rest of your site.

That spam score won’t help with that. Ignore it.”

Mueller’s advice highlights that third-party spam scores don’t influence Google’s rankings and should not be prioritized. Instead, focus on creating high-quality, valuable content.

Spam Scores Tell You Nothing In That Regard

John Mueller is right—third-party spam scores don’t accurately reflect site quality. These scores are merely the opinions of tool developers, often based on outdated or incomplete data. The factors used to calculate them are secret, and we cannot know whether they’re relevant. Moreover, there’s little consensus on what SEO ranking factors are or even if the idea of “ranking factors” is still valid. Today, Google relies on various signals to assess site trustworthiness and uses core topicality systems to understand search queries and web pages. This approach is far from the old method of ranking pages based on fixed factors.

The line between “ranking factors” and “signals” is increasingly blurred. Can we even agree on the difference? And where does something like a missing quality signal fit into a third-party spam metric? Popular lists of 200 supposed ranking factors often contain factual errors and outdated concepts that don’t align with modern SEO practices. We’re now in an era where search engines shift away from rigid ranking factors, focusing instead on advanced systems like SpamBrain to weed out low-quality sites and topicality models to interpret content.

Mueller’s advice is spot-on: don’t worry about spam scores.

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