6 Ways to Recognize Splog Blog Links for Pruning!

• We've been receiving an increasing number of link pruning requests from client sites affected by Penguin or manual Google link penalties. The vast majority of the links require pruning and are of the Spam blog or "splog" category. Some of these splog blog (at least on first glance) look okay, but we just aren't sure. Can you provide some auditing tips we can apply uniformly to better identify these splog blogs?

Answer: The best advice we can give you when conducting client pruning is to be AGGRESSIVE! This is especially true when you are doing so on a site that has received an unnatural link notice or has clearly been impacted heavily by a Penguin update. If you have any hesitation or uncertainty about how a post or link initially looks, it's probably a prime pruning target.

That being said, there are some GREAT auditing tips we can recommend you implement when reviewing suspected splog posts (and identifying the sites on which they reside) for possible pruning. These tips work for us, they'll cover 99% of any issues you run across, and they are recommendations from those experienced with link pruning. These are the red flags that we have identified when reviewing the impacted backlink profiles of our own client sites.

Red Flags to Identify in Your Link Portfolio

• 1. Know what a splog post looks like. Take a look at the blog here. Now, take a quick look at the most recent blogs posts here and here. Notice how all of them use anchor text rich links to different sites and are in completely different niches? Notice how the posts