How to do Spam Link Analysis before posting a link?

[bondhoward]

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?

[TomRayner]

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.

[MoosaHemani]

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!

[Kokolo]

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

[randfish]

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.