clear.your.mind

Toda y I saw a post at WebmasterWorld (actually, a friend of mine saw it and let me know!) it is one of those useful posts at a forum you can’t let go very easy. As the title says, it shows 25 signals to identify a crappy web site… some discussion has taken place on the web about the 25 points on the list, but it’s clear that if your site contains one of those, you don’t need to worry, just contact your webmaster or fix the error yourself. For example, my blog has sometimes misspelled words, that’s obvious, because English isn’t my first language, but that doesn’t mean my blog is a crap! that just means I have to get better at my English!

So here’s the list!:

1. Reciprocal link request pages.
2. No Privacy policy.
3. Outdated copyright date or last modified date visible on the pages.
4. Error pages that don’t send 404 headers or send content regardless of the page requested/querystring entered.
5. Massive numbers of incoming links from link farms.
6. Dead/404ing links.
7. High link churn.
8. No published contact address, email address or phone number.
9. A high bounce rate (surfers clicking back on their browser and selecting another search result).
10. Too much duplicate content.
11. Whois info for the domain which is the same as other domains previously penalized or banned. (Could also be true of adsense publisher/affiliate ID’s and other identifiable footprints)
12. Use of/links to affiliate programs that are known scams
13. Domains previously used for spam or that are blacklisted.
14. Stagnation (Site never changes)
15. Excessively long URI’s/URL’s (query strings or folder and file names)
16. A high percentage of affiliate links vs regular outbound links.
17. No / very few outbound links.
18. No / very few inbound links.
19. All inbound links are to homepage only
20. Outbound links to questionable/spammy/crap sites.
21. Profanity or explicitly adult language on a non-adult site.
22. Too many spelling errors.
23. Contains unrelated subjects (ex: a site that reviews toys and tries to sell insurance or viagra).
24. Lack of interest from social bookmarking sites.
25. MySQL or PHP errors in the pages

Privacy Policy can be also in form of Legal Notice or just the word “Terms”, like some sites have. Either ways, not having a Privacy Policy doesn’t mean your site is crap, just means you don’t have posted yet your Privacy Policy and you might need to do it quickly! :)