Things to look for to disqualify a website as a spammy fit and ignore from our link target worksheets. There are a few main red flags to look for.
Red Flag #1: Spammy Outbound Links #
You can use Ahrefs to export/view the outbound links. View the report page here and swap in the domain you are considering a link from.
Red Flag #2: Topical Focus Of The Website Content #
Site content not all all related/relevant (content about plumbing next to articles about iPhone cases for example).
Red Flag #3: Quickly Descending Traffic #
Review the site for any major (more than 50%~ or so) traffic drops in Ahrefs. Ignore/don’t get links from sites with less than 500 monthly organic search visitors or sites that have lost all of their organic search traffic.
Other Red Flags #
Here’s just a grab-bag list of other red-flags that we find often that typically indicate a spam site we don’t want a link from.
- .ru domain or .info domain
- Dashes in the domain name (when-you-see-domains-like-this.com)
- Content in many languages
- Hosted on .blogspot or .tumblr subdomains
- Site not working or has trouble connecting DNS records
- Site is just scraped information (for example, the site just shows hosting records or other website metadata): adds no value to those looking at the website for information
