Twenty Bad Ideas

I’ve decided to fire up a quick blog post highlighting twenty things which, in my opinion, make a bad website. Obviously there will be a lot more and that is where you, the readers, come in.

I’ll get the ball rolling with my twenty.

• Copyright date or the last modified date on pages not being updated.
• Lots of 404 pages
• A high bounce rate (surfers having to use their back buttons and selecting another result.)
• A lot of duplicate content.
• Whois info for the domain is the same as other domains previously penalised or banned.
• Domains previously used for spam or that are blacklisted.
• Use of/links to affiliate programs that are known scams.
• Massive numbers of incoming links from link farms.
• Stagnation of the site.
• Excessively long URL’s
• A high percentage of affiliate links versus that of regular outbound links.
• No / very few outbound and inbound links.
• All inbound links are to homepage only.
• Outbound links to spam sites.
• Spelling errors.
• Lack of interest from social bookmarking sites.
• MySQL or PHP errors in the pages.
• No published contact address, email address or phone number.
• Contains unrelated subjects (a site that reviews SEO and tries to sell something unrelated.)
• Profanity or explicitly adult language on a non-adult site.

Now it’s your turn.

November 5th, 2008