What is Moz spam score?

Read it literally. A spam score of 8 means roughly 8 percent of sites sharing your signal profile were penalized in Moz's sample. It is not an accusation. It is a base rate.

Moz built it by comparing banned sites against healthy ones and finding which characteristics separated them. The flags include things like very low link diversity, thin content signals, suspicious TLDs, and unusual anchor text distributions. Moz has changed the exact flag set over the years and does not publish the full current list.

The score matters most when evaluating someone else's site. Before you accept a guest post placement or a directory listing, check the spam score of the linking domain. Above 30 is worth a manual look.

False positives are common and real. Legitimate niche sites, non-English sites, and very new domains all score higher than they deserve. A high score is a prompt to investigate, never a verdict.

RankPulse tracks Moz spam score daily for the domains you monitor and emails you if it moves. That matters mostly as an early warning that something changed in your link profile. It cannot tell you which flag fired - Moz's API returns the score, not the breakdown.