With the latest Google panda update there’s been a lot more buzz about quality vs quantity. It seems crystal clear now Google is not just suggesting fresh unique content, they are endorsing it as a major part of their algorithms. I hope you are making these quality sites already, such as hand written adult blogs. But how do you know if the site you’re about to link to or from is low quality, which may affect your Google rankings?

Well, you should be able to easily spot link farms, those sites with gazillions of links and ads on every page. Google hints that any links over 100 on a page ‘might not’ be indexed, but it’s a gray area and it seems you are safe somewhat past that, but I personally don’t want any sites that have over 150 links, 200 tops.

Each person will have his own steps and tools to check a site out, unless you’re a new webmaster willing to link to or from anything out there. I thought I’d put out my checklist out there so we could share ideas.

Step 1. Visual check. Is there any surfer tricks? Is it giving away full length videos? Is it a link farm? Is it a static full page ad? Has it been updated recently? Are there excessive ‘dead space’ in posts, almost a sure sign of an rss fed splog? Does it have a niche or keyword I want?

Step 2. SEMrush check (free version). Does Google rank the site for any good top 20 terms? The more Google likes a site, the more I like it. I use the SeoQuake toolbar for Firefox/Chrome so it’s just a couple clicks for me to see SEMrush details, domain age, incoming links, Yahoo site explorer, etc.

Step 3. Quality check. Is it well written unique text? Do I think a surfer mind spend some time checking this site out? I usually scroll down to the bottom of the page and verify it’s in English most people can read easily, not broken or quasi-human English. Then I copy a sentence in the post and pop it in Google (with quotes) to see if it appears on a number of sites. If it does, that’s usually a splog alert.

What additional checks do you do?