Would you disavow links that have a Moz Spam score of 5?

[SwanseaMedicine]

As the question suggests...

[MarieHaynes]

Spam score can be a useful adjunct when helping you decide which links to disavow, but you should never make a disavow decision based on spam score alone.

The disavow tool should be used by site owners who have a huge problem with unnatural links. If you know that this link is one that you yourself made for SEO purposes alone and that you have lots of links like this, then yes, you should probably disavow it.

But otherwise I wouldn't be too concerned.

[Hurf]

No problem. I've expanded upon the original answer to clarify what the Spam Score references. This may be useful. (Read from UPDATE: down).

I hope that helps.

[SwanseaMedicine]

Thank you!

[Hurf]

Nope. Moz suggest you don't get too excited about anything below an 8 and even then proceed with caution. Disavowing links is not usually something Google would expect you to need to get involved in, unless you are dealing with thousands of links.

"This  [Disavow backlinks] is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."

From: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487

EGOL (who is wise in such matters) references this in a recent Q and A post and says he has never disavowed a single backlink, I've only ever done so once, in a panic and don't see myself doing so again. Much better to concentrate your efforts into countering the spammy links with great content.

UPDATE: Another thing to consider, if you click on Open Site Explorer > Spam Analysis  - You'll see a number of these flags are issues you can fix without disavowing links. More often than not, you can fix a few of those. And remember, the Spam Score is not some hard and fast rule that Google follows; they are just a set of signals that Moz believe to have a correlation to Google penalties.

Here's the full list of Spam Flags from OSE > Spam Analysis:

Low MozTrust or MozRank Score
The site link profile is not trustworthy.

✓

Large Site with Few Links
We found very few sites linking to this site, considering its size.

✓

Site Link Diversity is Low
The diversity of link sources to this subdomain is low.

✓

Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Subdomains
The ratio of followed to nofollowed subdomains linking to this subdomain is outside the normal range of others in our index.

✓

Ratio of Followed to Nofollowed Domains
The ratio of followed to nofollowed domains linking to this subdomain is outside the normal range of others in our index.

✓

Small Proportion of Branded Links
Links to this subdomain have low amounts of branded anchor text.

✓

Thin Content
A subset of pages within this subdomain have little content.

✓

Site Mark-up is Abnormally Small
There's a high ratio of visible text compared to HTML, JavaScript, etc.

✓

Large Number of External Links
A subset of pages within this subdomain has a large number of external links.

✓

Low Number of Internal Links
Pages crawled on the subdomain have a small number of internal links.

✓

Anchor Text Heavy Page
There's a high ratio of anchor text compared to content text.

✓

External Links in Navigation
There's a large number of external links within sidebars and footers.

✓

No Contact Info
None of the pages crawled contain an email address or links to a social profile.

✓

Low Number of Pages Found
Crawl only gets a valid response to a small number of pages.

✓

TLD Correlated with Spam Domains
This subdomain is on a top level domain (TLD) extension often found to be the source of spam links.

✓

Domain Name Length
This domain name's character count is higher than average.

✓

Domain Name Contains Numerals
Domain names including numbers are often found to be the source of spam links.

Good luck.