SEO
The Top 11 Social Media Sites & Platforms
Social media is integral to our daily lives.
With 4.8 billion social media users worldwide – accounting for 59.9% of the global population – social platforms have become necessary hubs for gathering information, connecting with our friends and loved ones, and growing our businesses.
And social media users have grown to trust and rely on their preferred social networks for everything from real-time news and updates to lifestyle hacks, product research, and more.
For marketers, the world of social media represents an expansive area of opportunity – and every user is a potential customer.
With the right tools, resources, and a strong social media strategy, marketers can leverage social media platforms to boost awareness for their business, engage their target audience, and even nurture a loyal community.
But with so many different social media platforms existing today, it’s nearly impossible to be present on every single one – let alone excel in every space.
Success in social media marketing starts with choosing the right platforms for your brand. You need to identify where your target audience is spending the most time and where it makes sense for your brands to interact with them.
In this article, we’ll look at the leading social media platforms, giving a quick overview of what they are before exploring what types of businesses might find them most useful.
Top 11 Social Media Platforms Compared
MAU* | Revenue | Launched | Headquarters | ||
1 | 3 billion | $116 billion | 2004 | Menlo Park, CA | |
2 | YouTube | 2.5 billion | $29.24 billion | 2005 | San Bruno, California |
3 | 2 billion | $906 million | 2009 | Menlo Park, California | |
4 | 2 billion | $51.4 billion | 2010 | Menlo Park, CA | |
5 | TikTok | 1.2 billion | $9.5 billion | 2016 | Culver City, CA |
6 | Snapchat | 750 million | $4.6 billion | 2011 | Los Angeles, CA |
7 | 465 million | $2.8 billion | 2005 | San Francisco, CA | |
8 | 430 million | $670 million | 2010 | San Francisco, CA | |
9 | 310 million | $12. 4 billion | 2006 | San Francisco, CA | |
10 | Threads | 120 million | Unknown | 2023 | Menlo Park, CA |
11 | X (formerly Twitter) | 56.1 million | $4.4 billion | 2003 | Mountain View, CA |
*Number of monthly active users worldwide
The Top 11 Social Media Apps By Monthly Active Users
MAU* | ||
1 | 3 billion | |
2 | YouTube | 2.5 billion |
3 | 2 billion | |
4 | 2 billion | |
5 | TikTok | 1.2 billion |
6 | Snapchat | 750 million |
7 | 465 million | |
8 | 430 million | |
9 | 310 million | |
10 | Threads | 120 million |
11 | X (Twitter) | 56.1 million |
*Number of monthly active users worldwide
The Top 11 Social Media Sites And Platforms
1. Facebook
Headquarters: Menlo Park, CA
Launched: 2004
Monthly Active Users: 3 billion
Founders: Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Andrew McCollum, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes
Revenue: $88-91 billion (2023) estimated
While Facebook might not be the exciting new platform it once was – and might have fallen out of favor with younger users – make no mistake: it’s still around, and more popular than ever.
Today, Facebook operates under the umbrella of Meta, Inc., which also owns platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads.
In recent years, Facebook has undergone a demographic shift – yet its influence in the social media sphere remains unparalleled.
Industries such as financial services, ecommerce, retail, media, telecom, technology, and consumer goods continue to harness Facebook’s expansive reach to connect with consumers and grow their brand awareness – with newer sectors like gaming, entertainment, and automotive businesses also finding their footing on the platform.
If you’re looking to drive conversions, your best bet is to invest in Facebook ads – especially given the News Feed is increasingly suppressing business posts.
That said, there are still plenty of ways to generate organic engagement without investing in ads.
Consider joining (or building) niche communities with Facebook Groups, leveraging Messenger chatbots for personalized communication, or using live video to encourage real-time audience interaction.
2. YouTube
- Launched: 2005.
- Headquarters: San Bruno, California.
- Monthly Active Users: 2.5 billion.
- Revenue: $30.4 billion (2023) estimated
- Founders: Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley.
YouTube continues to hold the crown as the dominant original video social media platform. It is currently the second most used platform, with 2.5 billion monthly active users.
The potential for reach on YouTube is unrivaled, with 89% of U.S. adults using the platform. Such engagement metrics are hard for marketers and brands to ignore.
From longform video storytelling to the recent introduction of YouTube Shorts, the platform’s TikTok rival, YouTube provides plenty of opportunities for brands to engage in visual storytelling and reach new audiences.
And according to the company, it’s a very powerful marketing tool. YouTube viewers say they’re 2X more likely to buy something they saw on YouTube, and 4X more likely to use the platform to find information about a brand, product, or service versus other social networks.
Whether you’re into beauty tutorials, gaming streams, education content, or DIY hacks, YouTube has it all. And for brands aiming to pivot into video-centric content marketing, YouTube is the platform to prioritize.
3. WhatsApp
- Launched: 2009.
- Headquarters: Menlo Park, California.
- Monthly Active Users: 2 billion.
- Revenue: $500 million – $1 billion (2023) estimated
- Founders: Brian Acton, Jan Koum.
WhatsApp remains the most popular social messaging app, way out in front of Facebook Messenger.
At first glance, brands might overlook WhatsApp’s potential, given its closed messaging nature. But consider that SMS has an average of 98% open rate compared to 20% for email.
It’s a captive audience. And, unlike SMS, WhatsApp messages are free to send.
For brands that want to improve their customer service efforts or connect directly with customers to answer their questions, WhatsApp has a ton of potential. It offers a uniquely direct and effective channel for interacting with your audience.
If you can crack WhatsApp, you’ll have a direct marketing channel to your audience.
4. Instagram
- Headquarters: Menlo Park, CA.
- Launched: 2010.
- Monthly Active Users: 2 billion.
- Founders: Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger.
- Revenue: $50.6 billion (2023) estimated
Instagram is a social network where product-based businesses, influencers, and coaches can thrive.
Launched in 2010, Instagram quickly became the leading image-based, visually-rich social platform. Since then, it has only grown in popularity and reach, becoming a place for users to conduct and research every aspect of their lives.
The platform has also introduced new features that marketers can leverage to grow awareness, including ephemeral Stories, vertical-video Reels, and more.
Since introducing shoppable posts in 2018, the potential ROI for product-based businesses has been higher than ever.
Not only can B2B businesses connect with a massive audience, they can seamlessly transition followers from product research to purchase by linking product information and making sales – all within the Instagram interface.
And if your target demographic is under 35, Instagram is a gold mine: over 68% of Instagram users are under 35.
5. TikTok
- Launched: 2016.
- Headquarters: Culver City, California.
- Monthly Active Users: 1.2 billion.
- Founders: ByteDance Ltd, Zhang Yiming, Toutiao.
- Revenue: $6.19 billion (2023) estimated
TikTok bills itself as “the leading destination for short-form mobile video” with a company mission to inspire creativity and bring joy. And evidently, it’s succeeding.
TikTok’s meteoric rise over the past few years has been unprecedented. In 2017, after only one year, the app became the fastest-growing app worldwide.
Its focus on short-form videos driven by audio and visual trends has taken the world by storm, with other platforms rushing to emulate it.
Despite attempts to ban TikTok in the U.S. and being banned in India, as of 2021, the app had been downloaded more than 3.5 billion times globally.
And while TikTok reaches users of all demographics, if your brand wants to connect with Generation Z, it should be your first priority.
In the U.S., it’s particularly popular among the 12 to 17 age bracket, who constitute about 17.7% of the user base.
Those users are highly engaged, too, with the average user spending nearly 54 minutes on the app every day – the longest amount of time of any app, ahead of YouTube at 48.7 minutes.
6. Snapchat
- Headquarters: Los Angeles, CA.
- Launched: 2011.
- Monthly Active Users: 750 million.
- Founders: Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy, Daniel Smith, David Kravitz, Leo Noah Katz.
- Revenue: $4.6 billion (2022).
If a younger audience is your target, Snapchat might be a platform worth considering. This social platform is a great place for connecting with millennials and Gen Z users.
Almost half of all users on Snapchat are 18 to 24-year-olds, showcasing its immense appeal to the younger generation.
The average Snapchat user spends 19 minutes per day on the app – not enough time to rival that of TikTok and YouTube, but still an opportunity window for brands to reach and connect with them.
Snapchat has a uniquely organic feel, with content that offers an unfiltered glimpse into everyday moments – so the platform is a haven for user-generated content, behind-the-scenes videos, exclusive offers, and influencer takeovers.
The platform has always maintained its commitment to real-time, ephemeral content, and it offers a sense of privacy to users that many other social platforms do not. For this reason, it’s a worthwhile tool for brands that want to authentically speak to a younger demographic who might be less interested in the broader approaches of other social networks.
And while it may not get as much attention as the likes of Instagram and TikTok, Snapchat is quietly humming along. Since launching its premium subscription service Snapchat+, the brand announced it has generated 5 million paying subscribers who are willing to dish out money for access to exclusive features.
7. Pinterest
- Launched: 2010.
- Headquarters: San Francisco, CA.
- Monthly Active Users: 465 million.
- Founders: Ben Silbermann, Paul Sciarra, Evan Sharp.
- Revenue: $2.8 billion (2022).
Like Instagram, Pinterest is a social media platform that’s focused on rich visuals. From delicious recipes to home decor inspiration, wedding ideas, workout moves, and DIY-related content, Pinterest is where visual dreams come to life.
If your brand has an interest in visual storytelling, Pinterest is the platform for you.
Notably, 60% of Pinterest users are women. If your audience is predominantly women, that’s a compelling reason to invest time in social media marketing on Pinterest.
That’s not to say that men aren’t on Pinterest – male Pinners are up 40% year-over-year (as are Gen Z Pinners!).
What’s more, Pinterest has proven itself to be a powerful marketing tool. 85% of weekly Pinners have made a purchase from a Pin, while 80% have discovered a new brand or product on Pinterest.
8. Reddit
- Launched: 2005.
- Headquarters: San Francisco, CA.
- Monthly Active Users: 430 million.
- Founders: Steve Huffman, Alexis Ohanian, Aaron Swartz.
- Revenue: $670 million (2022).
Reddit heralds itself as “the front page of the internet,” and according to Alexa rankings, Reddit is one of the top 20 most-visited sites.
It has become known as the dominant digital watercooler, and replaced forums and chatrooms of yore to be the go-to place for connecting with likeminded communities and getting your questions answered.
Reddit has a unique blend of content and community, with more than 2.8 million communities, or subreddits, dedicated to every topic imaginable. Whether you’re in tech, fashion, gaming, or health, there’s at least one subreddit actively discussing your industry.
With so many niches, there’s a place for every brand and business to engage their audience – it’s a matter of finding the niches where your potential customers are active and diving in.
However, be warned: Reddit thrives on authenticity and genuine interaction. Users don’t typically respond well to blatant self-promotion, and marketing gimmicks will be met with sharp skepticism.
Brands should beware before wandering into any subreddit and trying to tout their products to community members.
It’s crucial to get the tone right from the beginning, as commentators won’t hesitate to call out and critique what they perceive as inauthentic.
Engage thoughtfully, contribute genuinely, and Reddit could be an incredible marketing tool for your brand.
9. LinkedIn
- Headquarters: Sunnyvale, CA.
- Launched: 2003.
- Monthly Active Users: 310 million.
- Founders: Reid Hoffman, Konstantin Guericke, Allen Blue, Jean-Luc Vaillant, Eric Ly.
- Revenue: $15 billion+ (2023).
LinkedIn has been somewhat of a dark horse among social media platforms. While many may not initially have expected a career-focused social platform to take off, it has become one of the more popular and engaging platforms, with a vast and influential community of professionals.
The platform boasts over 180 million users holding senior roles, 63 million decision-makers, and 10 million C-level executives – making it a hotspot for those aiming to connect with folks who have the power to hire your company, stock your product, or partner with your brand.
And the platform isn’t just for networking – it’s an aspirational hub. Every week, 61 million people use LinkedIn to search for job opportunities – so it’s a smart place to market your brand.
LinkedIn is a very focused social media platform. Because of that, it has unlimited potential for connecting with an elite group of professionals who can make a difference for your business.
10. Threads
- Headquarters: Menlo Park, CA.
- Launched: 2023.
- Monthly Active Users: 120 million (2023).
- Founders: Mark Zuckerberg.
- Revenue: Unknown.
The newcomer to the block, Threads was created by the team behind Instagram and launched in July 2023. The text-based app was designed as a competitor to X (formerly Twitter).
It looks and functions quite similarly to X (formerly Twitter), though Threads requires you to have an Instagram account in order to sign up.
Threads initially made a splash in the social media space by quickly surpassing 150 million downloads and becoming the most successful social media platform launch in history.
Since then, it has struggled to retain users – but there is still plenty of promise for the future of the platform.
So, who should be advertising on Threads? It’s still early days, so the answer isn’t totally clear yet.
The good news is that Threads appears to be engaging users by leaning into its strategy to create a positive community space, and veering away from the highly politicized landscape that you might find on X.
If your brand is looking for an alternative to X (formerly Twitter) or is keen to try your hand at a new platform, Threads is certainly worth testing.
Its integration with Instagram means that you have the potential to build a following quite rapidly if you have a strong and engaged Instagram community.
11. X/Twitter
- Headquarters: San Francisco, CA.
- Launched: 2006.
- Monthly Active Users: 56.1 million (2023).
- Founders: Jack Dorsey, Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Noah Glass.
- Revenue: $3 billion (2023) estimated
Since being purchased by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in October 2022 for $44 billion, X (formerly Twitter) has been facing some major changes and hurdles.
It has lost approximately 13% of its daily active users – and the response to the platform’s rebrand from ‘Twitter’ to ‘X’ didn’t help things either.
With average users and brands both increasingly turning away from the app, some are heralding its potential demise – while others say nothing much has changed.
In spite of a clear understanding of what the future holds for the platform, if your business is related to entertainment, sports, politics, tech, or marketing, there are still opportunities to drive great engagement on this app – if you can find your audience there.
On X, brands have an opportunity to craft and hone their voice. There’s room to be clever and personable while still being informative and helpful.
Jump into threads, provide value, share your own content as well as others, and join the conversation. Just be sure to monitor the app and your audience to make sure your investment is paying off.
Which Platform(s) Should You Use?
The ubiquity of social media is undeniable.
From your teenage neighbor who wants to go viral on TikTok to your 86-year-old grandmother who’s using Facebook to track down long-lost friends, everybody has a use for social media.
Yet, when it comes to business, a one-size-fits-all approach to social media won’t work.
So, if you were hoping you’d reach the end of this piece, and find a simple, definitive answer on the perfect platform for your brand, you’re out of luck.
Every social media mix will be unique.
Each platform offers distinct features and functionalities, some which align more naturally with specific industries or marketing objectives.
Whether you’re looking to boost customer engagement, increase reach, or create unforgettable brand experiences, it all starts with getting clear on your goals.
Start by understanding your objectives, figuring out where your audience is most active, and then tailoring your strategy to resonate on those channels.
It’s all about making the right choices and finding authentic alignment in order to make use of this powerful marketing opportunity.
Updated with data from DataReportal’s Digital 2023 October Global Statshot Report.
More resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article 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.
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.
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.
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:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- 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.
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!
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
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.
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:
“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:
“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.
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.
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:
- 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
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
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:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- 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.
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
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero