What is Spam Score

What is Spam Score and how is it calculated?

We have enriched Backlinks API with the Spam Score metric, and from now on our API can evaluate the “spamminess” of each returned backlink or group of backlinks.

The new metric can be found in the following endpoints:

What is Spam Score?

Spam Score is DataForSEO’s proprietary metric indicating the spam level of a page, group of pages, or an entire domain (depending on the endpoint you’re using). It can take values from 0% to 100%:

A score of 0%-30% is considered a low Spam Score.

A score of 31%-60% is considered a medium Spam Score.

A score of 61%-100% is considered a high Spam Score.

The score is calculated based on 18 signals, which are listed in the table below.

How Spam Score of a page is calculated
To calculate the Spam Score for a page, the API considers various signals: from whether the page has contact information to which protocol it uses (HTTP or HTTPS). Below we list all the signals and show their impact on the overall score.

How Spam Score of a domain is calculated

When it comes to calculating the Spam Score for a group of pages (backlinks_spam_score) or an entire domain (target_spam_score), the API calculates the Spam Score for each individual page and then finds the average.

For example, if a domain has 5 pages with 30%, 45%, 20%, 10%, and 70% Spam Scores, then its Spam Score will be: (30 + 45 + 20 + 10 + 70) / 5 = 35%.