After you’ve been hanging out on the street corners of the internet for some time, you get to recognise the characters – the websites – you can trust and those you can’t. In many cases it involves purely judging books by their covers – none of these features taken in isolation would indicate a spam site, by any stretch of the imagination. But when you see a guy with dark glasses, dirty clothes, greasy hands, and a big hat on to hide his face … you don’t go giving him your credit card details, do you?! Have a look over these features that can make you look like a spammer – and think about whether they might be negating your good internet marketing work.

SEO

There's all sorts of Spam sites - don't let your site resemble one!

  1. Domain names like .info, .cc, etc.
  2. High ratio of ads to content … most quality sites prefer to sell their service or their info, not everybody else’s
  3. Spam keywords! Pharmaceuticals, gambling or adult related terms
  4. Few direct visits, as opposed to search engine visits
  5. Not registered with Google Webmaster Tools or similar services
  6. Does not have an SSL security certificate … especially on the credit card payment pages.
  7. Not listed in the Yahoo Directory – that link costs a couple of hundred dollars but is standard for most sites that are serious about being found on the net.
  8. Contains multiple hyphens in the domain name
  9. Do not contain a privacy policy or copyright pages
  10. No physical address or phone number listed on the site. If you are taking payments from your customers this is a must – many people will check to see that you’re a ‘real’ company before they even consider handing over their sixteen digits and expiry date.
  11. Not registered on Google Local
  12. No social media initiatives, like Facebook Pages, Myspace profiles or Youtube channels
  13. No links from domains with .mil, edu or .gov extensions. Obviously these are hard to get – but it is just another piece in the distrust puzzle.
  14. Domain is registered by a party that owns a large number of domains – people that have a ‘harem’ of domains.
  15. Contains malware, viruses, spyware and automated downloads. Of course sometimes legitimate sites get hacked and have viruses inserted too … but you don’t want to be around those either!
  16. Misspellings! Everyone slips up now and then – but if you don’t have your site professionally proofed and edited, you definitely run the risk of losing trust from your visitors
  17. Don’t usually pay for PPC traffic, or end up close to the bottom of the sponsored results.
  18. The content on the site does not require a high reading level, as measured by the Fleisch-Kincaid scale that ‘grades’ text according to who could understand it
  19. Contain a large number of snippets of duplicate content
  20. Not likely to offer content in the forms of PDFs, PPTs, Word DOCs, etc.

If your site matches many of these characteristics, and especially if you haven’t upgraded your design in quite a few years, you’re likely to be seen as a spammer by visitors, although you might have the best of intentions. Get a web marketing expert to help you clean up the site … and stop letting visitors go to waste!