SeoBook has a good post about quick indications of low quality search spam and this is becoming more and more important in determining how a client’s website is going to rank.  Earlier this month Matt Cutt’s announced that Google was deciding not to index certain types of sites where it detected high amount of Spam Sites in the sites backlinks.  Google also looks at what a site is linking out to.

Here’s a quick list of SPAM you can cut out of your site immediately, care of SeoBook.

• URL name - does it have 12 dashes in it? Is it a subdomain off something totally unrelated? SPAM!
• folder names - are the exceedingly long and/or redundant? SPAM!
• file names - are they redundant with the file paths and long? SPAM!
• page titles, headers and content - are they so keyword rich that it is illegible? SPAM!
• design - does it look like a 4 year old put it together? does the design not match the site? are the colors just ugly? SPAM!
• graphics - do you use the a similar graphic to what most spammers in your industry use? SPAM!
• ad placement - is the ad block floated left inline with the content area? SPAM!
• outbound links - does it only link to crap off topic sites that link back? Is there a huge irrelevant link exchange area? SPAM!

One of the other things I noticed is excessively commercial content categorization can be an inhibitor of ranking in the top non-commercial results.   MSN has a good categorizer for this:  Detecting Online Commercial Intention tool.   Generally speaking, the very top search queries for "free" search results, or "organic" need to be information and transactional in nature as categorized by the search engines.  

Why? because the results are "free" vs. Paid (which are on the right and top) - if you want to rank high for Paid, you pay for it.  If you want to rank high for organic results - you have to provide the best information and have the highest quality backlinks.  That’s the deal and search engines are more and more making that distinction.

So the top organic result for "office furniture" in Google is:  http://www.officefurniture.com/

Result: Commercial-Informational (Page)

Probabilities for Each OCI Type:
Commercial-Informational    Prob.: 0.56323
NonCommercial                    Prob.: 0.29864
Commercial-Transactional    Prob.: 0.13813

What about the top organic result for "house plans" in Google:

http://www.coolhouseplans.com/

Result: Commercial (Page)

Probabilities for Each OCI Type:
NonCommercial                    Prob.: 0.48197
Commercial-Informational    Prob.: 0.40292
Commercial-Transactional    Prob.: 0.11511

Look at my top house plans client who is on the second page of results.

Result: Commercial-Transactional (Page)

Probabilities for Each OCI Type:
Commercial-Transactional    Prob.: 0.39236
Commercial-Informational    Prob.: 0.32321
NonCommercial                    Prob.: 0.28443

Certainly, if the category "house plans" is considered by Search Engines to be a commerical category - then your page is going to need to be considered to be "commerical". However, since free results depend on quality of information, your page must also be "informational" or "non commerical" to rank at the very top for organic results - backlinks notwithstanding.

See how much SEO is changing.  People want to twiddle with keywords - but now it’s also what you actually put on the page.  My client has a couple of ads for Lamps Plus on their page- guess what that cost them?  A first page listing and hundreds and hundreds of visitors a day that don’t come to their site because the search engines think the site is about doing a commerical transaction rather than providing information.

Think hard about what you put on your pages if you want Organic traffic.