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10 Remarketing Lists To Boost PPC Performance

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10 Remarketing Lists To Boost PPC Performance

Remarketing lists are a powerful tool for all Google Ads campaign types – but specifically for Google Search ads.

With the looming, inevitable privacy updates coming to advertising, remarketing lists are a vital part of any PPC strategy.

Remarketing allows you to hyper-target specific audiences who are already familiar with your brand to help maximize return on ad spend (ROAS).

A consumer journey can have countless touchpoints before making a purchase.

Below you’ll learn 10 creative and actionable use cases of Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSAs) to capture potential customers earlier in their purchase journey.

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With so many opportunities to use remarketing lists, let’s break down strategies based on where they’re at in the funnel.

Top-Of-Funnel & Awareness Remarketing Strategies

These three remarketing strategies cover the basics of top-of-funnel marketing and utilize different campaign types to help leverage your RLSAs.

1. Target Users Who Have Engaged With A Video Campaign And Encourage Them To Take Action

If you’ve tried YouTube Ads in any form and have struggled to determine or quantify success, then this strategy might be for you.

YouTube ads are a great way to gain awareness of a product, service, or brand – but how do you get a new user to take action from that first touchpoint?

Enter in remarketing lists.

Google Ads allows you to create different types of remarketing lists based on your Youtube videos. There are two key requirements for using this list type:

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  • These lists can only be used in other YouTube or Search campaigns – not Display.
  • Your YouTube channel must be linked to your Google Ads account.

To set up YouTube remarketing lists, navigate to Tools & Settings > Shared Library > Audience Manager.

In Audience Manager, hit the “+” button to start segmenting your YouTube remarketing lists.

Screenshot by author, October 2022Choose to remarket YouTube users in Google Search Ads campaigns.

From there, Google gives a multitude of options to start leveraging your YouTube video engagement for remarketing. These options include engagement from:

  • Views to videos.
  • Subscribes to the channel.
  • Visits to the channel.
  • Likes on videos.
  • Add videos to playlist.
  • Shares of videos.

Further, you’re able to segment further to make your remarketing lists as specific as possible:

Choose from a variety of user engagement options for YouTube remarketing lists.Screenshot by author, October 2022Choose from a variety of user engagement options for YouTube remarketing lists.

To leverage these newly created YouTube remarketing lists, try adding them to your existing Search campaigns as “Observation Only” at first to understand if these users are more likely to interact with your campaigns versus someone who hasn’t seen your YouTube videos.

Taking it a step further, you can create new Search campaigns that specifically target these users.

The benefit is that you can provide different messaging to these users who have already interacted with your brand.

2. Exclude Low Quality Or Irrelevant Website Traffic From Search Campaigns

If you’ve run any type of awareness campaign, you’ve likely seen a boost in traffic overall, including irrelevant webpages or low-quality visitors.

What do we constitute as low-quality or irrelevant webpages?

  • Any page that wouldn’t result in a purchase, such as:
    • Careers page.
    • Investors page.
    • Advertise with us page.
    • Customer Service page.
  • Users who stayed on the website for less than one second.

Excluding these types of website visitors from the get-go can help make your remarketing efforts more cost-efficient in the long run.

3. Create Lookalike Audiences From Your Own First-Party Data

Using Google’s affinity audiences or attributes that consider someone at the top of funnel for your product or service can be daunting, especially if you’re a small business or have a limited budget.

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It may feel that you don’t have a lot of options to reach new users without paying dearly for it.

But, have you ever thought about using your most valuable assets to build awareness?

Leveraging your own first-party data to create Lookalike audiences gives you more leverage than third-party data, such as Google’s affinity audiences, to reach like-minded people of users who already love your brand.

To create an audience like this, there are a few options to consider:

  • Create a remarketing list of past purchasers using Google Ads or Google Analytics.
  • Upload a list of past purchasers to Google Ads.

Depending on the size of these lists, you’ll have the option to create a Lookalike audience and use it for either YouTube, Display, or Search.

The example below shows what a remarketing list based on a completed purchase URL looks like when created in Google Ads:

Use URL paths to create remarketing lists of past purchasers.Screenshot by author, October 2022Use URL paths to create remarketing lists of past purchasers.

I personally like to use Google Analytics when creating remarketing lists because you have many more segmentation or filtering options to be as specific as you need to be.

As a reminder, your site must be tagged and linked with either your Google Analytics property or Google Ads tag.

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Consideration Stage Remarketing Strategies

These four remarketing strategies help move the user from the consideration to the purchase phase quicker using different bidding strategies and offers.

4. Increase Bids For Qualified Visitors Of Your Site Who Haven’t Made A Purchase

An easy way to leverage qualified users in your existing Search campaigns is to increase the bid on those users simply.

You don’t need to create separate campaigns for these users if you don’t want to. Segmenting these users and manipulating the bids on them keeps your account management under control.

To use this strategy, you’ll first need to create a remarketing list of users who haven’t made a purchase yet. You can use qualifications only to include people who:

  • Have made it to the cart checkout.
  • Visited a certain amount of pages.
  • Spent a certain amount of time on site.
  • Visited certain categories/high-value product pages.

Once you have created those, it’s time to add them to an existing Search campaign and increase the bid.

What this means is that you’re willing to pay more for their click because they’ve already interacted with your brand in some way.

In your Search campaign, navigate to “Audiences” on the left-hand side.

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In this example, I’m setting the audience at the campaign level, but you can set them at the ad group level as well.

Make sure to choose “Observation” so you’re still able to capture other new users who are researching your brand.

Choose Screenshot by author, October 2022Choose

Once you’ve added your qualified remarketing list, it’s time to increase your bid adjustment.

Still, in the Audiences tab, you’ll see your remarketing list added.

In the columns, you’ll see “Bid Adjustment.” Choose the “pencil” icon to change the bid as you see fit. In this example, I’m going to increase the bid by 15%.

Choose to increase bids on remarketing lists in Google Ads.Screenshot by author, October 2022Choose to increase bids on remarketing lists in Google Ads.

Once you’ve implemented this change, be sure to continuously check back on the audience performance and determine if bids need to be changed based on performance.

5. Increase Bids For Users Who Have Completed A Micro-Conversion

This strategy is similar to the example above, except for the type of user you want to target.

If a user has completed a micro-conversion of any sort, they’re likely a high-qualified user to make a purchase.

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What are examples of a micro-conversion? Depending on your product or service, these could include:

  • Signing up for emails or newsletters.
  • Downloading an ebook.
  • Signing up for a webinar.
  • Requesting a free sample.

These types of conversions show a user is active in research mode and seriously considering your brand.

By increasing the bid in your search campaigns for these users, you’re saying you’re willing to pay more for their clicks because they’re that much more likely to convert.

The process of setting this strategy up is the same as above, with the exception of creating a remarketing list based on the success of these micro-conversions.

6. Test Maximize Conversion Value With Cart Abandoners

This remarketing strategy would require you to create a separate campaign targeting only cart abandoners.

You may be asking, “Why not just use Maximize Conversion Value for everyone?”

If you’ve ever tested out the Maximize Conversion Value bidding strategy in Google Ads, you’ll know exactly why.

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The reasons I don’t recommend using this for all campaigns include:

  • You can’t set any maximum ceiling values.
  • Not all users are ready to purchase.

By segmenting a search campaign specifically for cart abandoners, you can test this bidding strategy at a lower threshold – and with the most qualified users who are most likely to make a purchase.

Similar to the above examples, this strategy tells Google that you’re willing to be more flexible in how much you pay for someone to make a purchase.

And what better way to test this than with users who were almost ready to make that purchase?

To set this strategy into motion, you first need to create a remarketing list of “Cart Abandoners.”

This will look different for everyone, but it will likely be URL-based and able to be created in either Google Analytics or Google Ads.

After that list has been created, it’s time to set up your new search campaign.

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This campaign can be a duplicate of any other search campaign. Just make sure to exclude your Cart Abandoner list from that existing campaign. We don’t want any cross-over here!

When creating the new campaign, this is where you’ll set the bid strategy to “Maximize Conversion Value” in the settings.

Where to set bidding strategy to Maximize Conversion Value in Google Ads.Screenshot by author, October 2022Where to set bidding strategy to Maximize Conversion Value in Google Ads.

Google Ads does give you the option to set a target return on ad spend, giving you somewhat control over campaign performance.

Depending on how much flexibility you have in your marketing budget, you can either leave that blank or set a target.

If you do set a target ROAS, make sure not to set it too high right away. Otherwise, the campaign won’t be able to effectively learn.

7. Create Offers Based On The User’s Interaction Timeline

Did you know you can create the same remarketing list of users but segment them by the number of days?

Say you had a cart abandoner and wanted to move them toward purchase ASAP. You may be willing to give them a higher discount since the purchase was still new in their mind.

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If they still haven’t purchased within three days, you may choose to still give them a discount, but not as high as the first offer.

After seven days, you still want them to keep your product top-of-mind, but that discount or offer may change again because they’ve waited so long.

So, how do you go about setting up this strategy?

First, you’ll want to create three different remarketing lists (for this example only).

Create cart abandoner audiences separated out by one day, three days, and seven days.

In Google Ads, you simply change the “membership duration” for each list. An example of where to change that during list creation is below:

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Choose different membership durations in remarketing lists.Screenshot by author, October 2022Choose different membership durations in remarketing lists.

Once these lists are created, I recommend setting up different ad groups for each list. You’ll want different ad groups because the offer will be different for each list.

The last crucial piece of targeting cart abandoners is to exclude purchasers from your campaign. You will do this in the “Audiences” tab of your campaign and add your “Purchasers” remarketing list as an exclusion.

Post-Purchase Journey Remarketing Strategies

Once a user has made a purchase, that’s not necessarily the end of their journey!

These remarketing strategies enable past purchasers to become your most valuable asset and opportunities for repeat purchasers to become brand advocates.

8. Cross Promote Other Products Based On A User’s Purchase Behavior

One of the best ways to create a repeat purchaser is to recommend complementing products based on a user’s purchase.

For example, say you’re a makeup brand, and a user just purchased their first tube of lipstick and mascara from you.

An effective remarketing strategy would include creating lists of past purchasers segmented by product category. This enables you to cross-promote other products and exclude product types they’ve just purchased.

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In this example, you may create a remarketing list of users who have bought lipstick or mascara. You can then use that list to remarket products like foundation or eye shadow to encourage a repeat purchase.

These lists and strategies would work well in Dynamic Remarketing Ads or Google Shopping Ads. Because these products are much more visible, you’d want to use those campaign types to your advantage.

9. Exclude Past Purchasers To Maximize Spend Efficiency

As mentioned in strategy no. 7, you’ll want to exclude past purchasers from current acquisition campaigns to maximize spending efficiency.

An example of lazy remarketing is for a user to see an ad for a product they have already purchased.

Not only does that create a bad taste for the user, but that means you’re wasting valuable marketing money on people who have already purchased.

Now, there are certainly times when you’d not want to exclude past purchasers, especially if your product is a repeat purchase.

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But, in these examples, your search campaigns are likely going after new users.

To exclude past purchasers, go to Audiences on the left-hand side of your campaign, then find the “Exclusions” table.

Exclude past purchasers from Google Ads campaigns.Screenshot by author, October 2022Exclude past purchasers from Google Ads campaigns.

10. Create Brand Advocates From Your Existing High-Value Customers

It’s true when they say that your customers are your best advocates. They have put their trust in you to deliver a high-value product or service that they have come to know and trust.

So, how do you turn them into advocates?

This remarketing strategy still includes utilizing that same past purchaser list. A few different options you could potentially offer past purchasers:

  • Create a referral program and give discounts for each person who purchases.
  • Offer discounts based on providing a positive public review.

Just because someone has purchased from you once does not mean they become a loyal customer. Sometimes it takes additional motivation to want to purchase again.

Loyalty or referral discounts are a great way to keep your existing customers coming back to you, as well as utilizing their own referral vehicles to generate new customers.

Creating referral programs is a low-cost and efficient multi-channel awareness strategy that is mutually beneficial for you – the brand and the customer.

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Summary

Remarketing is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. In today’s age, it requires thoughtfulness, tactfulness, and segmentation to be successful.

Thinking outside the box on your remarketing strategies can result in more cost-effective advertising, higher ROAS, and faster growth if you utilize them correctly.

Sometimes, the power of remarketing lies within the list setup and campaign segmentation.

More Resources:


Featured Image: Andrii Yalanskyi/Shutterstock

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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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