Transcript
Hi guys and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is how to tell if the SEO for a site is spammy. This could be for your own site or for another site. It doesn't really matter. All we're discussing today is how to tell if it's spammy or not. But first, before we begin, let's go ahead and introduce the tea we have today. Today we have a Pu'Er Tea that my uncle has gifted to me, the same uncle who has gifted to me this whole tea set. I don't think I've ever gone over it before, but one of my uncles from Malaysia, he's really into tea, he loves tea, but his kids are not and he has amassed this large tea collection. And his kids don't really enjoy it as much, but he figured out that I do so he kind of has graciously gifted me teapots and tea leaves so that I can enjoy it as well and could understand a little bit better. So again, thank you to my uncle who has really helped me there. Kind of helped me create this tea addiction.
Let's go ahead and get brewing and talking about it. So, how to tell if the SEO of a site is spammy. This is important if you are evaluating different SEO companies. In my own world I use this one, I'm auditing other people's websites and they ask me, "Hey, can you take a look at the SEO we've done, or the SEO one of our companies have done, can you help us spammy or not?" That's something that generally I do day to day, but I guess for someone like maybe yourself who runs a business who has your own site, if you're evaluating other people's SEO work this is how you can tell if it's spammy.
And I have to make it clear. I know this might be obvious, but the reason why this is important is because Google really likes to not deal with spammy SEO strategies so they will penalize. Now you can always play the game of Oceans 11. You can be smarter than Google and always be one step ahead of them by trying to trick them. I never really tried to play that game and I've met very few people who have successfully played that game. So, I generally try to follow the above board, white hat SEO. But how to tell if a site is doing SEO spammy is, I generally kind of do it through different distancing criteria so I'm going to kind of do straight up consciousness of how I have usually evaluate.
When I look at a website, I usually pull it into my [HREF 00:02:14] or SEMrush tools. And the first thing I look at is where the links are coming from. A lot of tools will provide these tools and maps to show, okay, these are the links coming in and where do they generally come from? If a lot of your links are coming from international sources and you have zero business being international, that can usually be a sign. So for example, if 80% of your links are coming from Russia, China, African countries, South American countries, but you're a local pizza shop, then that would point to me that there may be some spamming at hand. It is not always a hundred percent like you are spammy, but that usually signals to me, hey, there might be something. so there is a caveat though. There are companies that do operate internationally and then those, it makes more sense to have international links.
After I see that where I go do is I look under the hood and look at the number of links and the number of referring domains coming in. I want to see what they are. If you have thousands of thousands of links, but all the domain authorities and domain ratings of these links are below five, generally that is a really bad sign for me too, because you are a link building up by doing a lot of the craft. You're doing a lot of spammy link building, which is going to very low value sites and trying to drive links to your website. Google has already had updates addressing that so that is also kind of a spammy thing.
And a third one, and it's kind of the same thing as number two, is how many links you're building from forums. Forum link building is a really old, old school way of link building that has no business being a strategy now. I'm sure some people are somewhat successful with it to this day, but it's really old school and not something that you should be doing. I almost relate it to auto dialers. I don't know how auto dialers are making a comeback, but forum link building has kind of that same realm. Forum link building is not very strong. It's something that a lot of, I would say, spammy SEO companies use, and it's not very effective anymore because Google oftentimes will nofollow forum links anyways. But saying that, that's kind of another way.
Another way that I actually use generally as my top method of really understanding if someone's doing spammy SEO is I analyze the anchor text. So this does require actually most of what I've discussed requires some SEO tools like HREF or SEMrush. But what I'd like to look is the anchor text.
The anchor text usually will, and any SEO report will tell you, of the links coming in what is the anchor text that is used to drive the link to our website? Now, if you don't know what anchor text is, there is a video about what anchor text is. So you can go watch that video so we can kind of keep this one short, but I analyze the anchor text and what the anchor text will help me do is see what are the links coming in and what are they coded as? Because if they're relevant, then I'm pretty confident that, hey, you know what? This probably is fine.
Like for example, if you have a pizza shop and a lot of the anchor text says pizza, pizza recipe, whatever variation of pizza, well, it's probably not spammy, but if the anchor text is really all over the map, if you have to ask yourself why, that might point to spamminess.
So, the most extreme example I've ever seen was, I did an audit for a plastic surgeon, I believe, in LA. And when I was looking at their anchor text, when I looked under the hood, the most common anchor texts they had was not safe for work anchor text. So I guess the most PC way I can put it was like XXX was an anchor text or adult entertainment was anchor text. Essentially what was going on was the SEO company they had hire was building links by adding links to foreign websites and foreign forums and that's how they were driving most of their links to the plastic surgeon's website, right? So, that is another example of really spammy SEO tactics that I discovered through anchor text. So my go-to generally is anchor text because anchor text will usually uncover weirdness.
Again, like I just said that one was weird adult things for a plastic surgeon. That just seemed weird. Sometimes I have found like a company, they sell... Oh yeah, this is a great example. I had one where a company was a health application, but the number one anchor text was like, download this PDF. But I thought that was unusual. Why would of the biggest thing be download this PDF? I looked into it. I knew it was a spammy SEO link building where people were putting, download this PDF, but actually would just drive to the homepage of the client website. So anchor text usually is the number one way I use it. But again, like I said, how I kind of do at first is I check them by country, then check by the general patterns of scores on the referring domains coming in, and then I look at anchor text. That's usually how I tell someone's doing spammy work.
There is another layer. This one doesn't require heavy SEO levels of skill, I mean softwares. This one is just an eye test. Look at their blog. If the blogs seem really reporting in, but ran a lot and really keyword intensive, that can also be a sign of the SEO spamming. That one's not as strong. I know perfectly good SEOs who admittedly do very SEO sounding content and it's not that spammy, but it gives a lower user experience. I wouldn't say that's spammy so much, but it's also another red flag. If you see other red flags and that one comes up, then you can be more confident but if that's the only thing that's happening, it may not be the case.
But those are all the different kinds of areas I use to gauge if someone is doing a spammy SEO, and that's how you can kind of tell as well. If you ever suspect that, I'm someone that makes it my job to try to make SEO a less spammy and less black hat place so I kind of want to put this out there. If you ever kind of feel like your site may be engaging in SEO spamminess through a vendor or for someone you hired, you can always reach out to Zupo or myself and we will take a look.
We try to help everybody in SEO, making sure that they're doing good SEO, but I hope again, that's valuable. Hopefully that will help you figure out if what's going on is spammy or not. And if you guys found the video valuable, please like and subscribe. I'm going to go ahead and pour my tea out. And I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody. Cheers.
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