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12 Link Builders Share Strategies That Work in 2024

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12 Link Builders Share Strategies That Work in 2024

I asked 12 SEOs for the link building strategy that’s working best for them right now.

Here are the tactics they shared, how to do them, and tips for success. 

This has been my go-to link building strategy for quite some time now. What makes this approach very effective is that it touches multiple campaign objectives beyond just building topical authority and improving search rankings.

Jason AcidreJason Acidre

How to do it

Let’s say you were doing this for MailChimp. You might want to find listicles that feature brands like ConvertKit and Aweber but not MailChimp—like this one: 

List of the best email marketing software that features brands like ConvertKit and Aweber but not MailChimpList of the best email marketing software that features brands like ConvertKit and Aweber but not MailChimp

To find these, run this search in Ahrefs’ Content Explorer: 

[competitor 1] +[competitor 2] -[your brand] title:(best OR top)

For example, to find listicles that mention Aweber and ConvertKit but not MailChimp, you’d search for: convertkit +aweber -mailchimp title:(best OR top)

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Searching for listicles in Content ExplorerSearching for listicles in Content Explorer

If you spot a listicle where you feel you should be listed, find their email address and reach out to them. 

Here’s an example email Jason used: 

Example outreach email from Jason AcidreExample outreach email from Jason Acidre

I don’t recommend copying Jason’s email word for word, but here’s his and Alex Tachalova’s advice on what to include: 

Some key pointers for emails: 

  • Briefly highlight why your product or service merits inclusion on their list.
  • Reference other reputable lists that have already featured your product or service.
  • Inquire about their criteria and requirements for inclusion.
  • Offer free tool access, complimentary products for review, or case studies that they can review (if you’re providing a service).
Jason AcidreJason Acidre

Our pitches generally include: 

  • The client’s previous features in listicle posts.
  • A suggestion to collaborate on enhancing the quality of their listicle post, given the client’s industry expertise.
  • An analysis of top-ranking listicle posts to identify missing tools or information that could offer a competitive edge and improve their post’s rankings.
Alexandra TachalovaAlexandra Tachalova

As Jason points out, this strategy has benefits beyond improving rankings for your website. It also exposes your brand to more people as you’re consistently listed as a top option in your industry. 

For example, Jason got his client mentioned in nearly every top-ranking listicle for “best dropshipping suppliers.” That’s a lot of extra brand exposure! 

Apart from the selfie battle I have with Tim Soulo, this is one of the most effective link-building strategies we’re using right now. 

Jason HennesseyJason Hennessey

How to do it

Start by finding a trending topic journalists care about. Google News and Google Trends are good places to start. 

We start by identifying current trends using tools like Google Trends and monitoring industry news. 

Jason HennesseyJason Hennessey

We use lots of techniques from monitoring news sources in real time to conducting research with Google News to understand the types of topics that have been previously covered at specific times of year. 

Amanda WallsAmanda Walls

You can also use the Growth metric in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

For example, if I enter “vaping” and sort by the Growth column, I see lots of lung health searches breaking out in the past three months: 

Growth for terms related to lung health and vaping in the past three months, via Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerGrowth for terms related to lung health and vaping in the past three months, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

I also see this echoed in Google News: 

Google News results for vaping features many stories about lung issuesGoogle News results for vaping features many stories about lung issues

It’s then a case of sourcing some unique data, publishing it in an easy-to-utilize format, and sending it to journalists. Matt Diggity shared a few great sources with me: 

For government databases you have usa.gov for the states. Data.gov is another alternative. UK Data Service is the equivalent for the UK. Eurostat is great for other countries in the EU. And Statistics Canada is for… yeah, Canada. Internationally, World Bank Open Data and United Nations Data are treasure troves. Pew Research Center is great for social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends. FBI Crime Data Explorer is great for crime stats. And the CDC is great for health data. 

Matt DiggityMatt Diggity

Amanda also often uses freedom of information (FOI) requests for data, as she did for her piece on the UK’s illegal vape hotspots:

UK illegal vaping hotspots campaignUK illegal vaping hotspots campaign

This campaign earned links from 72 referring domains and got featured in many online newspapers: 

The campaign earned links from 72 referring domains according to AhrefsThe campaign earned links from 72 referring domains according to Ahrefs
Lancashire Post article that links to the campaignLancashire Post article that links to the campaign
Example feature in the Lancashire Post
Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herald article that links to the campaignArdrossan & Saltcoats Herald article that links to the campaign
Example feature in the Ardrossan & Saltcoats Herand
South Wales Guardian article that links to the campaignSouth Wales Guardian article that links to the campaign
Example feature in the South Wales Guardian

How do you find journalists? 

Here’s Jason’s advice: 

We start by researching those who have previously covered similar topics or industries. We use tools like Muck Rack, Cision, or even X to find journalists by searching for keywords related to our story. We look at bylines in relevant publications to see who is writing about related subjects and review their past articles to understand their interests and writing style. 

Jason HennesseyJason Hennessey

Journalists are always looking for comments, tips and advice from thought leaders. Nurture these relationships and meet request deadlines, and you position yourself as the PR expert who can help during busy periods.

Eva ChengEva Cheng

How to do it

One way is to sign up for HARO and other alternatives, but Eva recommends a more proactive approach. She builds relationships with journalists relevant to her clients so they come directly to her for tips and quotes.

How can you find these people? 

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Eva uses keyword alerts: 

I have Google Alerts set up for relevant keywords related to a brand or topic. For example, I have the words “vet,” “dog behaviour,” and “cat behaviour” set up for a pet insurance brand so I can see the related coverage mentioning these words. 

Eva ChengEva Cheng

You can also use Ahrefs Alerts. The benefit of this over Google Alerts is that you can filter by language, traffic, Domain Rating (DR), etc. to separate the wheat from the chaff: 

Setting up alerts for "cat behaviour" in Ahrefs AlertsSetting up alerts for "cat behaviour" in Ahrefs Alerts

Alternatively, use Content Explorer to find people who’ve talked about topics recently. Just search for a keyword and filter for pages published in the last 90 days. 

For example, if I search for “vet,” I see this recent article on a DR 83 site from Jessie Quinn: 

Content Explorer shows the author of the postContent Explorer shows the author of the post

It looks like she’s written a couple of pet-related articles recently: 

This author has written a few pet-related articlesThis author has written a few pet-related articles

Her profile also says she writes for many well-known sites and has a pug called Daphne: 

She also has a pet of her ownShe also has a pet of her own

This journalist would clearly be a great person to build a relationship with! 

How? Eva says it all starts with a simple “hello”:

Reach out and introduce yourself and your client to journalists and niche publications who cover related topics regularly. Offer them the opportunity to receive exclusive commentary when requested. After a journalist has covered your campaign or expert commentary, always drop them a note to say thank you. You never know it can also lead to another request or opportunity for your client. 

Eva ChengEva Cheng

Oh, and don’t rely on AI when actually replying to requests, whether direct or via platforms like HARO. Greg explains why: 

AI is not yet capable of replacing a high quality writer. Simply copy/pasting their content over to a journalist outreach email is a fantastic way to earn your client a spot on a journalist or publication’s ban list. When our writers use AI, they use it for idea generation to overcome writer’s block. This is how I recommend using it. 

Greg HeilersGreg Heilers

Data-driven digital PR campaigns, like maps, are our most effective method for driving backlinks at the moment. 

George DriscollGeorge Driscoll

How to do it

Start by brainstorming topics with map potential that make sense for your brand. 

Ask yourself, what would a journalist and user expect you to be an expert on? For a cocktail brand, doing a map on speakeasy bars around the world would make perfect sense, or a map on the rooftop bars with the best reviews, etc. 

George DriscollGeorge Driscoll

If you’re struggling for ideas, search for a topic in Content Explorer and filter for pages with lots of backlinks. These are proven ideas you know people want to link to.

For example, if I search for “tax,” I see over 300 referring domains to a page listing countries where you have to pay “tourist tax”: 

This list of countries with tourist taxes has links from 325 referring domainsThis list of countries with tourist taxes has links from 325 referring domains

This immediately sparks an idea: map out countries with the most and least expensive “tourist taxes.” 

Once you have your map, send it to journalists who might be interested in covering it. 

Find journalists who write about that kind of content, either literally map based data, or perhaps in the example above, they write about travel. 

George DriscollGeorge Driscoll

George did this for his map of which states will pay the most taxes over their lifetime… 

George's campaign for which states pay the most taxes in their lifetimeGeorge's campaign for which states pay the most taxes in their lifetime

… earning links from 188 referring domains in the process: 

George's campaign earned links from 188 referring domains according to AhrefsGeorge's campaign earned links from 188 referring domains according to Ahrefs

As Jason suggested earlier, tools like MuckRack, Cision, and X can be useful for finding journalists interested in your topic. But you can also just search Content Explorer for pages published about a topic in the last 90 days, and extract journalist names from there. 

Using Content Explorer to find journalists who've covered a topic in the last 90 daysUsing Content Explorer to find journalists who've covered a topic in the last 90 days

Our unique process for this has worked amazingly well for us for years now. In fact, we’ve just finished some internal research and found our assets like this generate an average of 102 referring domains. 

Darren KingmanDarren Kingman

How to do it

  1. Enter a topic into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Filter for keywords that include terms like “statistics,” “facts,” “graph,” etc.
Finding stats keywords in Keywords ExplorerFinding stats keywords in Keywords Explorer

This will find keywords people search for when looking for facts and figures for their articles. Rank for these, and your page will often earn links on autopilot. 

Here’s Darren’s advice on what make a good keyword: 

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The most important thing is that there isn’t just one or two top-ranking pages soaking up all the links. If there’s 3 or 4 that have 100+ and a couple with 20+ or so, that’s all good. It shows there’s a nice spread and journalists/linkers are happy to mix it up themselves. 

Darren KingmanDarren Kingman

This is exactly how the SERP looks for “uk salary statistics:” 

The top search results for "uk salary statistics" have lots of referring domainsThe top search results for "uk salary statistics" have lots of referring domains

In fact, Darren and his team created one of the top-ranking pages. As of today, it’s earned links from 98 referring domains: 

Darren's page, which earned links from 98 referring domainsDarren's page, which earned links from 98 referring domains

And this is without outreach! 

Importantly, we don’t do outreach for these campaigns. They’re designed to remove that element of time and therefore making it more affordable for clients compared to our other activities. 

Darren KingmanDarren Kingman

How do you create a winning page? It’s all about picking low-hanging opportunities and beating the competition on the content front. 

We’re often looking for opportunities where the ranking pages aren’t properly fulfiling a user’s intention. They may not have many images to engage users, the key stats might be buried in a wall of copy, etc. So we’re utilising content marketing 101 to see where we might be able to elevate a page and make it more engaging. 

Darren KingmanDarren Kingman

From some campaigns, I’ve seen over 291 referring domains secured from media sites. The crazier the giveaway, the more chance of backlinks. 

James NorquayJames Norquay

How to do it

Brainstorm trending topics with potential for a unique promotion that you can tie back to your brand. 

For example, Dish Network ran a promotion offering $1,000 to anyone willing to binge watch 15 hours of The Office: 

Dish promotion where you could earn $1k for watching The OfficeDish promotion where you could earn $1k for watching The Office

It earned links from 150 referring domains, including big media sites like Thrillist, Business Insider, CNET, Mental Floss, and many others. 

Dish's campaign earned links from 150 referring domainsDish's campaign earned links from 150 referring domains

Struggling for ideas? Try asking ChatGPT: 

Hey ChatGPT. I found a unique promotion online where Dish Network offered to pay people $1,000 to binge watch 15 hours of The Office. My brand is [brief description]. Give me a few ideas for a similar promotion I can run.

Here’s one idea it came up with for a coffee brand: 

ChatGPT is a great way to come up with ideas for your brandChatGPT is a great way to come up with ideas for your brand

Not bad! 

But who should you tell about your wacky campaign once you have it? Here’s a smart tip from James: 

It’s as simple as reaching out to the same publications and journalists who’ve covered similar things before. You can find plenty of these already online from movies and tv shows. 

James NorquayJames Norquay

For example, you can just export the 150 sites linking to The Office campaign via Site Explorer and reach out to them. 

Find people linking to similar campaigns in Site Explorer, then reach out to themFind people linking to similar campaigns in Site Explorer, then reach out to them

I have to give credit to Russ Jones (RIP) who was one of the most switched on link builders and SEOs I have ever met for this tip he shared with me. 

James NorquayJames Norquay

How to do it

Start by finding relevant pages with lots of backlinks in Ahrefs: 

  1. Search for a topic in Content Explorer
  2. Filter for pages with 100+ referring domains
  3. Filter out subdomains, homepages, and multiple pages per domain
Finding pages with lots of backlinks in Content ExplorerFinding pages with lots of backlinks in Content Explorer

In the example above, there are 1,952 pages about tax with links from over 100 websites. One of them is this federal income tax calculator with 1,500 referring domains: 

Example of a page with a federal income tax calculator that has backlinks from over 1,500 referring domainsExample of a page with a federal income tax calculator that has backlinks from over 1,500 referring domains

Next, run a free audit with a tool like AccessScan to check how accessible the page is for people with disabilities: 

Running a compliance audit with AccessScanRunning a compliance audit with AccessScan

In this case, the page is non-compliant. This means that over 1,500 sites are linking to a resource that isn’t accessible for users with vision, motor and cognitive impairments—including a few government and education websites: 

Filtering for educational and government backlinks in Site ExplorerFiltering for educational and government backlinks in Site Explorer

Here’s what James says to do next: 

You reach out to the website and say the resource on your page is not accessible to visually impaired users. This is a highly successful outreach method vs just sending emails at scale asking for guest posts. 

James NorquayJames Norquay

Of course, this does mean you need to create an alternative resource that is compliant. But that’s easily worth it when there’s a pool of hundreds or thousands of potential linkers. 

I know it might sound a bit old-school, but guest posting still delivers great results. However, the days of mass emailing generic pitches are over. The strategy is the same—offering valuable content for a link—but the execution needs a fresh approach. 

Bibi Lauri RavenBibi Lauri Raven

How to do it

First, you need to find sites that might be open to a guest post. 

To do that: 

  1. Run an “In title” search for a broad industry term in Content Explorer
  2. Filter for sites with a Domain Rating (DR) between 30-60 (this removes big sites that probably won’t accept guest posts)
  3. Go to the “Websites” tab
Searching for guest post prospects in Content ExplorerSearching for guest post prospects in Content Explorer

Here you will see the top 100 sites getting the most search traffic to content about your topic. These are good sites to pitch a guest post, as they’ve already written about similar topics before. 

Bibi recommends using AI to help with your pitch: 

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Ai is an awesome tool [for pitching]. It can help you create everything from catchy subject lines to compelling pitches and even eye-catching visuals. 

Bibi Lauri RavenBibi Lauri Raven

For example, she used AI to create Midjourney images that combined cats and dogs with her target niche. When she reached out to trucking companies, this charming approach got a lot of positive attention. 

One of the images Bibi used in an outreach campaignOne of the images Bibi used in an outreach campaign

If zany or “out there” isn’t really your jam, that’s fine. As Bibi says, it’s not a necessity. The point is to use AI to improve your pitches and make them more creative. 

You don’t always need to be funny or wild, but AI lets you create highly targeted content in formats that would typically require a whole team with specialised skills. So, even though guest posting might seem basic, the possibilities are endless with AI. Just keep experimenting with it! 

Bibi Lauri RavenBibi Lauri Raven

Find a page with links, make something better, pitch it as a replacement (aka the “skyscraper” technique)

[/blockquote]

Most people assume that “skyscraper” is dead because it worked well in 2017, then got abused until it didn’t work anymore. But we’re finding that it’s starting to open up again now.

Eric CarrellEric Carrell

How it works

This is arguably the most famous link building technique there is, but if you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last decade, here’s how it works in a nutshell: 

How the Skyscraper Technique worksHow the Skyscraper Technique works

For example, this list of best headphone recommendations has 469 referring domains… 

Example of a potential skyscraper prospectExample of a potential skyscraper prospect

… but it hasn’t been updated since 2021: 

The page hasn't been updated for years and is now out of dateThe page hasn't been updated for years and is now out of date

Given how fast the headphone industry moves these days, this means that hundreds of sites are linking to a completely outdated list of recommendations. 

To take advantage of this, you would: 

  1. Publish an up-to-date list of headphone recommendations (aka. “skyscraper” content)
  2. Pitch this as a replacement to everyone linking to the outdated post.

Here’s a quick tip from Eric to help maximise your results: 

Give people extra incentive to link by offering to share their content on your social networks. We do this when promoting our clients’ content and it still works relatively well. 

Eric CarrellEric Carrell

Keep learning

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this post. If you want to learn even more about building links, check out these posts and courses: 

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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

Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc

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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

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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