One thing you don’t want is a “spammy” blog. Often bloggers run into the problem where they don’t intentionally mean to have a “spammy” blog, but nevertheless it appears spammy to the reader. How can you prevent this? In this blog post I have a few tips to help you out. Also, this post will be helpful to you if you find yourself trying to locate blogs to purchase reviews from. In doing so you will find what I have found and that is the difficulty in locating high quality blogs to purchase blog reviews from through portals like PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews. This blog post essentially serves these two purposes:

1. Help you in making your blog “spam free” in the eyes of your visitors
2. Help you find high quality “spam free” blogs to purchase blog reviews from

Let’s get right to it!

Bad English

Grammar problems are one thing, but there’s nothing spammier than flat out bad English. You’ve seen these types of blogs before. In these blogs it’s very common to have the site title and/or blog post titles with grammar problems. This appears to the reader that your content is auto generated and not written by a real human.

Weird Domain Name

I ran into a blog the other day through SponsoredReviews.com with the domain ahdxgz.com and it was supposed to be about education. Education? Really? Domain names that contain gibberish raise red flags for many readers. It’s also a problem if the domain name is of a completely different topic than the blog content.

Common WordPress Template

If a blog uses a generic, regularly used WordPress template it shows a lack of care and effort by the blogger. But worst off, there’s a good chance the blog is spammy as many splogs use these generic wordpress templates for their design because they are easy to get up and running on a mass level. Also overall, if there is no effort into the design of the blog at all this raises red flags for spamming. A real blogger will typically put some effort into making his/her blog visually unique and not so sloppy.

Nothing on the About Page

The about page is important to me as the reader. I as the reader want to see if there is anyone behind the scenes. If there is actually a writer who cares for the blog and invests time into it. Also, you will notice that most spam blogs have an about page, but contain only the default text that comes when WordPress is installed. A good way to detect a spammy blog.

Ads Everywhere!

Multiple Google Adwords units, Kontera ads, affiliate banner ads etc. These are all good things for highly reputable blogs. But Spammy blogs tend to overuse empty space by filling them with tons of ads. Go easy on the ads. Readers are smarter than you think. Too many ads equals too spammy.

3rd Party Service Blogs

These are blogs that are sub domains of services like Blogger, Blogspot, and WordPress etc. There are many good high quality blogs that are still running these services. But a majority of the time, a blog under a sub domain of one of these services is lower quality. And many are spammy. A blog on its own domain shows a little more commitment from the blogger.

Too Many Sponsored Blog Posts

If you see a blog with an overload of sponsored blog posts, there’s a good chance it’s a spam blog. You can usually sniff this out by seeing a variety of off topic blog posts, one after the other coupled with the fact that they are commercialized posts. If you detect this, chances are you are viewing a blog that is not really a blog, but just a hub for advertisements.

High Google Page Rank, Low Alexa Rank

Using a Firefox add-on such as the Search Status add-on, you can quickly view the Google Toolbar Page Rank and the Alexa Rank of the blog that you are viewing. Typically when you see a blog with say a Google Page Rank of 4 and an Alexa Rank of say over 3 million, chances are there’s a lot of link baiting going on, and not real value from the content being written.

A Blog about EVERYTHING!

You are sure to run into one of these every once in a while. Spammers like to use these all-topic blogs to get purchased reviews from sites like PayPerPost and SponsoredReviews. It helps them cover a much wider variety of topics and thus, get more money through more reviews. In contrast Blogs that are more topic specific look less spammy. Also, even if a blog isn’t about everything but there is some regular inconsistency in the topics of the content being written, this also looks spammy.

No Sign of Readership (community)

Last but not least is community activity. Blogs that are completely dead, dead as in no one is reading, commenting, or contributing tends to be because the content is crap. And most of the time the content is crap because it’s of a spammy nature. Blog comments, Google or Twitter followers displayed in the sidebar, and number of RSS Subscribers all show community around your blog. This is important because spam blogs don’t have communities of people around them.