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10 Ways to Cash In (+ Pros & Cons)

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10 Ways to Cash In (+ Pros & Cons)

Every other day, a new blogger claims they are earning a full-time income from their blog. But how exactly do they do it?

In this article, we will discuss 10 popular methods bloggers use to cash in on their passion, along with the pros and cons of each approach.

How much can you make from blogging?

Although many people claim to earn a full-time income, studies show only around 5%-8% of bloggers actually do. 

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The monetization strategies you use and how successful you are at implementing them play a huge role in how much you can earn from blogging. If you don’t know the different methods to use, you’re not going to cash in.

I personally know content site owners earning six figures from their blogs, while some can earn even more.

In fact, globally known blogger Pete Cashmore (made Forbes’ 2014 30 under 30 list) has an estimated net worth of over $120 million. This is largely thanks to his website, Mashable, which he started in 2005 and sold in 2017 for $50 million.

How do blogs make money?

Some of the most profitable blogs make money through affiliate marketing, sponsored posts, advertisements, product sales, services, and more.

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Each method requires careful planning and implementation to maximize your earning potential.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that success takes time; you’re not likely to see immediate results when launching a blog, even with the best monetizing strategies. It takes dedication and hard work before you start to reap financial rewards.

Now let’s dive into the 10 most popular ways blogs make money:

Advertising

Companies have always been willing to pay for advertising space. In the past, ads could be regularly seen on newspapers, magazines, and billboards. Today, it’s common to see display or banner ads on websites, which often rely on them as a source of income.

You can negotiate directly with a company or brand on a price you want and handle everything yourself. Or you can try an ad network like Google AdSense, Raptive, or Ezoic for a hands-off approach.

Either way, it works by placing ads on your website that are relevant to your content and niche. 

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When visitors click on the ad, you will earn a commission from the advertiser.

Display ad example
Example of a display ad from the Mediavine ad network.

How much can you earn?

Typically, you earn between $0.01 and $0.25 per pageview. Of course, this depends on your niche and the ad network you work with. 

Pros

Ads are relatively easy to set up and manage. Especially with some of the bigger platforms like Mediavine, you can have someone who manages everything for you. Plus, there’s huge potential to earn money passively over time.

Cons

Firstly, ads can be intrusive and detract from user experience. We’ve all seen sites with badly optimized ads where you can’t read one line of text because the page is plastered with ads. 

Secondly, it’s difficult for people who are just getting started to earn a good income passively solely with ads. Remember that many ad networks, like Mediavine, have a minimum requirement to join, such as 50,000 monthly sessions.

Those that allow you to join without a minimum requirement, like Ezoic, require you to complete courses and set up and manage your own ads if your site gets fewer than 10,000 monthly visits. 

Unless you’re comfortable managing ads, you’re likely not going to get the most out of them without assistance from the advertising network.

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Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a popular way for bloggers to monetize their websites. With affiliate programs, you can earn commissions when readers purchase products or services through affiliate links on your website. 

Creating a niche site that uses affiliate marketing as the main form of monetization is one of the quickest ways to earn a full-time income online. From personal experience, you can earn four figures a month within 12 months with a high-quality affiliate marketing site.

The truth is people love review content. For example, imagine you just got your first puppy. A super easy way to get what you need and feel confident as a new dog owner is to read in-depth reviews from other experienced dog owners.

Continuing with that example, a single page on the best dog food for 2023 can generate over thousands of monthly organic visits, ranking for hundreds of keywords. 

You can understand the demand for this type of blog when you look at the search volume of some keywords in the U.S. alone:

List of keywords, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer
Data via Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

Plus, the entire first page on Google for “dog food” shows commercial search intent, with numerous reviews also showing up.

SERP overview for "dog food" shows keywords with commercial search intent, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

You can work with affiliate networks like Amazon Associates and Commission Junction or through private affiliate programs. 

How much can you earn? 

On average, affiliate networks offer lower commissions (between 1% and 10%), whereas private affiliate programs offer anything up to 90% affiliate commissions. 

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Therefore, if you’re producing dozens of articles per month reviewing high-ticket items with an affiliate program that offers a 60% affiliate commission, you can earn a comfortable income. 

Pros

Affiliate marketing is easy to start, doesn’t require you to create and manage products or services, and can potentially bring in large commissions.

Cons

It requires a lot of work in the beginning (creating content, building relationships with affiliates, and so on) and can be difficult to scale over time if you don’t choose the right niche or have the right team in place.

Sponsored content

Social proof is one of the best ways to get people interested in your products. That’s why companies pay bloggers to write sponsored posts or create sponsored content in exchange for a fee.

Example of sponsored content

How much can you earn?

That will heavily depend on how much traffic your website gets, as well as how influential you are. But the average is anywhere between $25-$1,000 per post. 

Pros

This can be a great way to get paid for your content, with the potential to earn a large amount of money per post. It can also help you to build lasting relationships with brands.

Cons

It can be difficult to find sponsors, especially if you are not considered an “influencer” in your niche. It also requires lots of work (research, writing, promotion), and you must be careful to remain unbiased. 

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Selling services

By producing content on a particular topic and gaining a sustainable readership, people will naturally associate your name with your topic of expertise. That way, you become an authoritative voice in your niche. 

Because of this, bloggers can use their websites to market and sell services such as consulting, coaching, digital marketing services, and so on.

Example of consulting services
Example of digital marketing blogger Neil Patel offering consulting services on his site.

How much can you earn?

It depends on the service you’re selling. But as an example, consulting gigs can earn anything between $60–$300 per hour.

Pros

It’s easy to start with (assuming you have an existing reputation) and needs very little upfront cost or work to get going. Plus, there is potential for high earnings from services that can also build long-term relationships with clients.

Cons

If you want to actually deliver a quality service, you need to put all your efforts into it, which may be difficult to maintain if you’re already running a blog full-time. If you can’t, you will be offering a subpar service, which won’t have clients returning for more. 

It’s also difficult to scale over time, as clients want to work with you, the expert, not an employee.

Selling physical and digital products

Many bloggers create and sell physical or digital products on their websites, such as ebooks, courses, merchandise, etc. 

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Digital products are more scalable and don’t take as much work to put together. For example, with ebooks, you write the book one time, and then can sell thousands of copies year after year. 

Example of digital products for sale on a beauty blog
An example of digital products sold on the Hot Beauty Health blog.

How much can you earn?

Again, this depends on the products you’re selling. But it can be anything from $4 for a book to $50 for merchandise items like T-shirts.

Pros

There is huge potential for high passive earnings from sales of the products, and it is easy to scale.

Cons

Selling products requires a significant upfront investment in terms of creating the products. Even ebooks take significant time to write and edit, produce artwork, and so on. 

With physical products, there is the additional work of setting up the management of product sales to ensure products are manufactured and shipped without any problems.

Online courses

Online courses are a great way for bloggers to monetize their websites. 

As a topic expert, you can create an online course related to your niche and sell it on your website.

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There are even instances of people with successful personal blogs selling courses on “blogging tips” or “how to make money from affiliate marketing.” 

Example of a blog course
Example of courses available on the Authority Hacker blog.

How much can you earn?

On average, courses sell between $400 and $1,000 per sale. But of course, it depends on the niche and how much of a following you have.

Pros

There is a potential for high earnings from sales of a course, and it’s easy to scale with additional courses.

Cons

Courses require a significant time investment (creating the course content), require marketing efforts to find customers, and can be difficult to compete against larger businesses with more resources.

Coaching and mentoring

Bloggers can easily pick up a cult following of aspiring bloggers who want to be just like them. With expertise in your niche, you can offer one-on-one coaching or mentoring services to help others learn. 

As someone who has mentored many times, I can say from experience that it can be rewarding.

Coaching and mentoring example
Example of Women In Tech SEO’s mentoring program.

How much can you earn?

That depends on how well-established you are, but you can earn $50–$150 per hour on average.

Pros

Not only can you earn a solid income from coaching, but it can also be extremely rewarding to see former mentees build and develop their own successful careers.

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Cons

It requires a lot of work to deliver the service and build and maintain relationships, and you must be careful to remain unbiased and ethical when providing advice.

Public speaking

Bloggers with expertise in their niche can share their knowledge and experiences through public speaking engagements. This can be at industry workshops, seminars, and conferences. 

Write-up explaining what to expect from an SEO speaker
Example of SEO public speaking from Craig Campbell.

How much can you earn?

You can earn anything from $500–$10,000 per event, depending on how high-profile you are. 

Pros

There is potential for high earnings from speaking fees, and it is easy to scale with additional engagements. Plus, it requires minimal upfront investment.

Cons

You have to be comfortable speaking and often presenting in front of large audiences. You also need to be a naturally confident and competent speaker. 

Premium communities

Many bloggers create premium online communities and charge a fee for access. This can be for exclusive content, mastermind sessions, or networking with industry leaders. 

Example of a premium community
Example from premium SEO community Traffic Think Tank.

Private communities work by offering monthly or annual memberships to allow access to exclusive content.

How much can you earn?

These communities can earn anywhere between $50 and $150 per monthly subscription.

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Pros

Great potential for high earnings from membership fees, and it is easy to scale with additional members. Plus, you can build relationships with members.

Cons

It requires a lot of work to create and manage the community, and it can be difficult to find members if you’re just starting out.

Blog flipping

Buying and selling blogs is one of the most profitable ways to earn income online.

If you know what you are doing, you can buy a beginner blog with decent traffic relatively cheaply, make some improvements, and sell it for a profit—much like flipping a house.

You can buy or sell a site privately. Or you can do it through a broker’s website or marketplaces like Flippa, Investors Club, or Empire Flippers

Example of blogs for sale on a marketplace
An example of blogs for sale on Investors Club.

How much can you earn?

Content sites usually sell for anything between a 20–40x multiplier. So if your site is earning a monthly profit of $1,000 per month, it could sell for anywhere between $20,000 and $40,000. 

A successful blog can sell for around six figures. In fact, according to Empire Flippers, the average price of a content site is $101,400.

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Pros

There’s a huge potential to cash in by selling your blog. Plus, it gives you additional capital to buy blogs that you can sell later for a profit. 

Cons

It requires a lot of work to research potential blog opportunities, buy existing blogs, and manage them. Also, it can be difficult to find buyers or sellers, depending on the niche.

Top tips to make your blog a success

Now you know how blogs make money, you need to think about how you can make your blog a success and utilize those monetization methods to cash in as much as possible!

As someone who has built, managed, and sold multiple content sites, here are some of my top tips for success. 

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Choose a profitable niche

Choosing a niche that has the best earning potential is a crucial first step in the journey to becoming a professional blogger. Especially if you want to use affiliate marketing to monetize your blog, a niche with high-ticket items is a must. 

Many profitable blog niches are highly competitive, like lifestyle blogs and mom blogs—but don’t let that scare you off. Choosing a competitive niche gives you more opportunity to do competitor analysis and suss out what works and what doesn’t, giving you a blueprint to work from.

Keep it unique

With more than 600 million blogs out of 1.9 billion websites in the world and over 6 million blog posts published daily, you need something to set you apart from the competition.

Example of a unique blog angle
Example of an article on pet funeral planning from a blog about pet memorials.

There’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from a competitor who is absolutely killing it. But think of a unique way to go above and beyond to offer something better than what’s on the web. Here are some ideas on what you can do:

  • Write from your personal experience – If you want to start a pregnancy blog, talk about things you wish someone had shared with you when you were pregnant.
  • Offer more thorough knowledge than others – For example, go above and beyond with product reviews, such as including an unboxing and review video. 
  • Use custom visuals – Most people skim content. Infographics, videos, and original images can help catch readers’ attention. 
  • Fill gaps in the market – Maybe you love alpacas, but there just aren’t enough dedicated blogs out there. That could be your goldmine idea right there.

But an important note: It also needs to be of high quality! Being different isn’t enough. Blog posts that are expertly written with actionable advice are what both users and search engines want to see. In fact, Google’s guidelines state:

Organic or word-of-mouth buzz is what helps build your site’s reputation with both users and Google, and it rarely comes without quality content.

Make your content both useful and interesting by:

  • Finding a unique angle for your topic.
  • Writing clearly and concisely.
  • Making it easy to read and absorb.
  • Satisfying search intent and E-E-A-T.

Use SEO to grow free, passive traffic

Anyone can start a blog. But not everyone can make a blog successful. Search engine optimization (SEO) can help you earn free traffic from search engines like Google and Bing.

One of the biggest mistakes new blogs make is writing about the wrong things. Writing about topics that people are searching for gets your blog in front of interested readers. This can grow your audience and get more leads for your products, services, and courses. 

Using a keyword research tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer can allow you to identify relevant, high-volume keywords, understand search intent, and analyze competitors’ keyword strategies.

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Matching terms report results, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Want to learn more about SEO? Check out our SEO course for beginners.

Build an email list

As amazing as SEO is, things can change on a dime. Sometimes, you’re just one algorithm update away from losing half your traffic (yes, it happens!), and that’s why capturing emails is so important. 

A niche-relevant newsletter sharing your own content and any other relevant things happening, like news or job opportunities, is a great way to gain thousands of subscribers that can turn into leads and sales.

Example of an industry-specific newsletter
An example of one of the leading SEO newsletters, SEOFOMO, which has over 27K subscribers.

As long as you aren’t spamming, you can contact your email list whenever you want. This is a great way to capture leads if you add additional monetization methods like courses, products, or services. 

Expand your blog by adding additional channels

You can make the most out of your blog (and possible income streams) by adding additional channels like social media, YouTube vlogging, or even a podcast. 

Example of a blog with multiple channels
Example of a parenting blog that has expanded to include digital products and a podcast as an additional channel.

This allows you to expand your target audience and can give you opportunities for additional monetization methods (YouTube ads and sponsored podcasts, for example) and further revenue streams.

Final thoughts

There are many ways blogs make money, and many of these can be utilized to ensure your blog has multiple income streams. 

Whether it is recommending affiliate products in your blog posts or selling consulting services, there are many monetization methods with great earning potential open to even beginner bloggers. 

Got questions? Ping me on Twitter.

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How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

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Step-by-Step: How to Optimize Old Blog Posts for SEO

Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.

If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.

However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.

Ways to Optimize Older Content 

Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort. 

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Refresh Content 

If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.

Rewrite Old Blog Posts 

When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely. 

This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.

Delete Old Blog Posts 

You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it. 

Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.

Promote Old Blog Posts 

Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.

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Which Blog Posts Should You Update?

Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit. 

Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.

If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings. 

Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic. 

With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.

How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.

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Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.

Conduct New Keyword Research

Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic. 

Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too. 

Look for New Ranking Opportunities

When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it. 

Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags

If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags. 

Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:

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  1. Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
  2. Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
  3. Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made. 

Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page. 

Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags. 

Replace Outdated Information and Statistics

Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.

Tighten or Expand Ideas

Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more. 

Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:

  • Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
  • Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
  • Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
  • Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
  • Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
  • Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
  • Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.

Improve Visuals and Other Media

No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality. 

Update Internal and External Links

Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.

You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.

Optimize for Conversions

When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years. 

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So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.

Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post. 

Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.

Key Takeaway

Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions. 

By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

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