How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
-
OSE provides Spam analysis for website link profile, Do Moz have a tool to check the link quality before placing a link?
How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?
-
Good advice Tom! I agree that no single metric (or even a combination) can replace the value you'll get from doing a manual analysis and using your brain to consider whether a site is a good, safe target or not.
-
I haven't analyzed the Spam Link Analysis, but this is the first thing that came on my mind:
You can easily Publish the post as PAGE, while disallowing it to appear anywhere on your site, then check and delete the page.
There is really small chance that someone would see the page because you can only enter it if you know the link
-
I personally believe Moz should have come up with this tool a lot earlier but I am glad that finally Rand Fishkin announced that officially. Now when Moz have the tool it’s easier to understand that how many of links that are pointing to the website are good quality and how many of them are bad.
How to analyze SPAM manually?
Other than just tools you can check manually that what inks that you are planning to target contains quality. All you have to do is look in to the targeted links profile and see the kind of links they are receiving them self. If the links they are receiving are good, chances are the links will be good but if the link profile your target link contains is suspicious you probably should avoid building that link.
Hope this help!
-
Hi Howard
Other than using OSE, there are a couple of manual checks I like to take when checking a website's quality.
First of all - how many outbound/external links are there? By that I mean, how many other sites are they linking to? Are they linking only to sites related to their industry? How are they linking to them - is it brand name, URL or anchor text?
You don't want to work with a website that looks to be linking to dozens or hundreds of other websites - it might indicate a link farm (plus the link equity/strength that your link would get would be more diluted). Similarly, if the website is linking to lots of other websites in completely different industries, it may look quite spammy. And finally, if the website is aggressively using anchor text to link to those sites ("We recommend this company for cheap blue widgets" for example), again it would be one to avoid.
Another check I like to make is the social activity on the site and pages. Are there facebook likes/tweets? Comments on articles? These may not help with your SEO efforts directly, but it's another check to see whether the website is a legitimate website with a legitimate audience, and not spammy or a link farm. I would not rule out a website on just these grounds, but Google is quite clear in saying they want websites to engage with audiences and earn their links, rather than just get them on "strong SEO" websites.
Hope these two tips help.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Wordpress pages posts
Say you have a WordPress website with reviews and lists. Would you use "post" or "page" type for them? Is there any SEO advantage in using pages/subpages instead of posts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fabx1 -
Internal Linking - Can You Over Do It?
Hi, One of the sites I'm working on has a forum with thousands of pages, amongst thousands of other pages. These pages produce lots of organic search traffic... 200,000 per month. We're using a bit of custom code to link relevant words and phrases from various discussion threads to hopefully related discussion pages. This generates thousands of links and up to 8 in-context links per page. A page could have anywhere from 200 to 3000 words in one to 50+ comments. Generally, a page with 200 words would have fewer of these automatically generated links, just because there are fewer terms naturally on the page. Is there any possible problem with this, including but not limited to some kind of internal anchor text spam or anything else? We do it to knit together pages for link juice and hopefully user experience... giving them another page to go to. The pages we link to are all our pages that produce or we hope to produce organic search traffic from. Thanks! ....Darcy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
GWT - Links to website - Are they accurate
Hi I am looking at GWT more and more and I starting not to believe the information within it. For example we had a link on XYZ.com say 6 months ago. This link as been removed no reference to our website, however it still showing on GWT inbound links. I have noticed quite a few sites which have no relevance to our site. Is anyone else finding the information wrong in WMT
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Internal links question
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
URL Value: Menu Links vs Body Content Links
Hi All, I'm a little confused. I have read a number of articles from authority sites that give mixed signals over the importance of menu links vs body content links. It is suggested that whilst all menu links spread link juice equally, Google does not see them as favourably. Inserting a link within the body will add more link juice value to the desired page. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks Mark
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mark_Ch0 -
Link Research Tools - Detox Links
Hi, I was doing a little research on my link profile and came across a tool called "LinkRessearchTools.com". I bought a subscription and tried them out. Doing the report they advised a low risk but identified 78 Very High Risk to Deadly (are they venomous?) links, around 5% of total and advised removing them. They also advised of many suspicious and low risk links but these seem to be because they have no knowledge of them so default to a negative it seems. So before I do anything rash and start removing my Deadly links, I was wondering if anyone had a). used them and recommend them b). recommend detoxing removing the deadly links c). would there be any cases in which so called Deadly links being removed cause more problems than solve. Such as maintaining a normal looking profile as everyone would be likely to have bad links etc... (although my thinking may be out on that one...). What do you think? Adam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NaescentAdam0 -
Internal links in blog posts?
What's the best strategy for internal links in a blog post? Example, if I write a blog should I always place a link to the main site at the bottom when I place my signature and contact info? Should I just put links in the content? Or should I do both?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bronxpad0 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0