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13 Effective (And Low-Cost) Ways to Promote a Product

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13 Effective (And Low-Cost) Ways to Promote a Product

Promoting a product while low on cash—every company goes through this phase.

But the good news is you don’t need to spend a ton of money to get your product in front of the right audience.

We’ll start with things you can do for a product launch and move on to promotion tactics you can use at any stage. 

1. Build excitement on social media 

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Social media can be used for pre-launch marketing in many ways. 

For example, if you’re launching something you know people are going to be super excited about, you can capitalize on that by “leaking” product information before the launch. 

This will help turn that potential demand for a solution into anticipation for your product. 

Even simple means can do the job here, such as a countdown to launch day or a special pre-launch giveaway. 

Pre-launch giveaway example

One important thing to note is this tactic has little chance of succeeding if you have zero networking. 

However, this is something you should definitely try out:

  • If you have at least some following on social media. 
  • If you’re an active member of relevant communities. 

2. Send PR notes to industry websites 

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Oldie but goodie. A PR note, aka press release, is an official statement delivered to members of the media. It’s used to share something newsworthy with the aim of securing media coverage.

Brands have been sending out PR notes before you and I were born—and it still works today. 

Why? Part of the job of news websites is to inform their readers about new and exciting products they can use to help them at work or make their life simpler—and that product could be the one you’ve been developing. 

News based on a press release

The key to this tactic is to send your press release ahead of your launch to give journalists time to prepare. 

Moreover, you may want to shortlist a few important media outlets and offer them to be the first to get their hands on the product. 

To learn the art of creating and distributing PR notes (and get a free template), check out our guide: How to Write a Press Release

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3. Launch on a listing platform

Product Hunt, AlternativeTo, Hacker News. These are some of the listing platforms you can use to tell the world about your product. 

They’re great for product promotion for two reasons: the community and the distribution mechanism. 

When adding your product to those platforms, you’re not launching to the void. People gather around those platforms to see new products, try them, and share their experiences. And when you launch something users truly appreciate, you get rewarded with more exposure on the platform. And so, the cycle continues: more viewers, more comments/upvotes, more exposure. 

Product stats on Product Hunt
Product Hunt helped us promote our free Webmaster Tools.

Some other benefits of listing platforms: 

  • Feedback – If you want to learn how to improve your product to get more customers, you’re likely going to get some. Of course, everybody will be able to see the comments, so keep in mind this is a double-edged sword. 
  • Credibility – The platforms act as social proof that can build trust in your product.
  • Virality – In the best-case scenario, your product becomes really popular, and the community starts to recommend it outside the platform. 

Check out Product Hunt’s case studies. They show how the above benefits helped grow popular products like Notion and Loom. 

While most listing platforms will have that same community aspect, they will have their differences and unique features, so make sure to learn a bit about them.

For example, Product Hunt gives you the ability to advertise on its platform, while AlternativeTo allows you to list your product as an alternative to a staple in the industry and piggyback on its popularity. 

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SERP for "photoshop alternatives"
Photoshop alternatives get an estimated 6.5K searches in the U.S. alone every month. Some of that search volume goes to products listed on AlternativeTo.

4. Partner up with influencers 

Influencer marketing is about working with popular internet personalities to promote your brand’s message, products, or services.

Just to be clear, not all influential people in a given niche will be open for sponsored content. But for those who are, and there are a lot of them, sponsored content is one of the monetization methods without which their channel probably wouldn’t exist. 

There are influencers “suitable” for just about any kind of budget and most industries. Since we’re talking about low-cost tactics here, I’d recommend reaching out to nano and micro influencers. 

Five types of influencers

Their reach may be relatively low, but they may sit in the right niche for your product and have a strong engagement with their audience.

As a matter of fact, even big brands work with micro influencers. For instance, Peugeot, the European car manufacturer, invited micro influencers to the Brussels Motor Show to share their experience and promote the brand (case study). 

Micro influencer campaign example

While we’re talking about costs, it’s worth mentioning that some influencers may be open to non-cash compensation, such as:

  • Sponsoring a giveaway for their audience. 
  • Receiving freebies/swag. 
  • Getting invites to exclusive events. 

There are all sorts of ways an influencer can promote your product. These include hosting giveaways, doing product reviews, sharing your best content, or just doing product placements. And they don’t necessarily need to be one-off campaigns. They can be the start of a long business relationship. 

How do you find the right kind of influencer? Luckily, there are tools for that: Social Blade, Heepsy, and SparkToro, among others. 

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Next, you need to vet them in terms of things like recognition and resonance, reach out, and develop an influencer agreement. We share some tips on how to go through all that in our guide to influencer marketing for beginners

5. Create an optimized landing page 

By an optimized landing page, I mean a page optimized for search engines like Google. 

An optimized page is set up to rank for relevant keywords and generate free, passive, and consistent traffic. It’s just like the landing page for our free website traffic checker, which was optimized for, you guessed it, the “website traffic checker” keyword. It ranks in the top 10 for this keyword and over 400 other relevant keywords. 

Organic keywords report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Taking all keywords together, Google sends us about 31,000 visits each month without any ad spend from our side. 

Organic traffic data, via Ahrefs

The key to optimizing a landing page for SEO is finding a relevant keyword with the right kind of search intent. This means that the current SERPs for this keyword should imply that the searcher might be looking for a page offering a product and not, say, curated lists of products or guides. 

Let me unpack this with an example.

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Below you will find a comparison of two keywords. The one on the left shows a strong presence of product landing pages—a good sign you may rank for this with a product landing page. The one on the right shows no product landing pages. Thus, trying to target that with a landing page is not impossible, but certainly hard. 

Search intent comparison of two keywords

Here’s a breakdown of how optimizing a product landing page works:

  1. Use an SEO tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer to find relevant keywords that imply that the searcher may be looking for a product 
  2. Design the page for search intent; include information that should be helpful for the reader
  3. Optimize on-page SEO technicals (such as title tag, URL, and images) 
  4. Add relevant internal links
  5. Build backlinks

Head on to our guide on optimizing landing pages and learn all the details. 

6. Promote to your existing audience 

Got some social media following or an email list? Great! Use it for promoting your new product.

These contacts already know your brand, and that’s the first step to them becoming paying customers. 

On top of that, if you already have some satisfied customers, chances are they’ll be interested in the next product just because they liked the previous one. Statistically, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60%–70%, while the probability of selling to a new prospect is 5%–20% (source).

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To illustrate, Apple values returning customers so much that it offers to buy back their old iPhones.

Apple trade-in program for returning customers

A couple of things to keep in mind when promoting to your existing audience. You should: 

  • Consider segmenting the audience before messaging them. You may want to craft messages adjusted for the stage of the buyer journey
  • Be careful with any special deals for selected groups; instead offer something for everyone. 
  • Follow up with the most engaged people directly. People who gave you constructive feedback or were vocal about new features are the ones you’d want to message directly. 
  • Be prepared to pay for reach boosts on social media. They likely won’t cost you a fortune, but don’t expect to reach your entire following for free (social media doesn’t work that way anymore).
  • Make sure your followers and subscribers are not the last to learn about something. 

7. Create educational SEO content 

Educational SEO content is content designed to rank in Google and show users how they can benefit from your product at the same time. 

This kind of content promotes your product by bringing free, passive traffic from search engines to your website. 

The key here is organic traffic potential. While typical educational content can be created around any topic that supports product adoption, for SEO content, you need keywords with search demand to start with.

For example, since Ahrefs is an SEO tool, we can create educational SEO content for topics such as keyword research, link building, technical SEO, online marketing, and so on. 

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Traffic Potential of keywords, via Ahrefs

When you add up hundreds of keywords together, you get a considerable sum of consistent traffic that brings you visitors even years after publishing the content. 

Creating content like that follows the same, typical search engine optimization path:

  1. Find good keywords
  2. Create quality content
  3. Build links to it

The unofficial fourth point of that list is “wait.” Because the downside of optimizing for search engines is that it takes time to rank—typically three to six months. So while this is a great way to promote your product, it probably shouldn’t be the only one. 

Also, the thing is this: If you don’t try to rank for your relevant keywords, your competitors will. And if so, you’re going to miss out on all of that traffic. So check out our guide to SEO content for beginners and learn how to bring home some of that search demand. 

8. Leverage affiliate marketing 

Affiliate marketing is when a third party (the affiliate) promotes a product of the merchant (you) and earns a commission. 

There are basically two ways you can go about this marketing tactic: 

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While the latter option allows you more customization and you won’t be paying anyone any fees, the first option is probably the best choice for beginners. It’s less time consuming, less prone to errors, and it can likely be the most cost effective (fees are usually low, and you won’t need to build any infrastructure). 

Prepare to hand out from 5% to even 50% of the revenue you get through affiliates. This may sound expensive. But remember: You don’t need to pay up front, and the affiliate does all the work. 

Plus, until that affiliate makes a sale, that’s basically free promotion. 

How do affiliates promote products? Similarly to influencers, they create the kind of content they are best at and distribute it on various channels. 

Some of the most popular affiliate content formats are how-tos, tutorials, and reviews. Here’s an example from the prominent finance blog, Making Sense of Cents. 

Affiliate marketing example

9. Get featured in directories, rankings, and reviews 

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The demand for top products in any category is consistently high. You can see that in search queries. Here are some examples: 

Volume in the U.S. and global volume of sample keywords
Volume in this case refers to the search volume in the U.S., and GV refers to the global volume.

This means a lot of people are already looking for products like yours. 

But the problem is the ranking difficulty for these search queries will be too high to try to rank with your own content. Because these kinds of queries are usually dominated by authoritative websites with tons of backlinks. 

Solution: Get included in what’s already ranking. It’s your shortcut to the #1 page on Google for all of those hard-to-rank keywords. 

Of course, this is easier said than done. It all depends on how good your product is, and the editors will always have the final say. However, what can definitely help is to work on your pitch: 

  • Show them why your product is a serious contender in comparison to what they already have on the list
  • Make a strong case of why their audience will love your product
  • Flash the recognition you already got 

Also, note that people don’t just look for the “best” products. They also look for products that fill a specific need: for beginners, for marketers, for teams, under $100, etc. 

Those keywords will likely have less search demand but could still have a high conversion potential. You can use a keyword research tool to find these keywords first and then pitch the sites that rank for them. 

Keywords showing search demand for specific type of software
Data via Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

You can also find great opportunities if you follow links to your competitors. Here’s how it works in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer

  1. Enter your competitor’s URL 
  2. Go to the Backlinks report
  3. Enter the word “tool” in the Ref. page URL filter 
  4. Set the mode to Group by similar and sort the pages by Page traffic (to show the pages with the most organic traffic first)
  5. Open referring pages and see if you can get a good angle to pitch your product 
How to find pages to pitch by tracing backlinks

Tip

You can also turn on the “Dofollow” filter to prioritize pages that are likely to give a “followed” link, which will have a bigger impact on SEO than nofollow links. 
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"Dofollow" filter in Ahrefs Backlinks report

Guest posting or guest blogging is when you write for other blogs. 

Guest post example

The trick here will be to pitch only those topics where you can naturally feature your product. You don’t need to make the entire article literally about your product. A good, contextual mention can also create awareness about your product. 

Another thing to consider when guest blogging is the SEO aspect. In fact, a lot of marketers pursue this tactic only for the links. 

This means you can prioritize websites that can give you a good link. 

Six traits of a good link

You can learn how to tell the difference between high-quality and low-quality links in our full guide to link building. But for now, let’s focus on arguably the two most important link quality factors: authority and relevance.

While relevance is something you can quite easily infer from the topics that the site covers, authority is not that transparent. 

To get a good idea of a site’s authority, you’ll need an SEO tool. You can use Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar as you use Google or check each site you want to pitch for free with our website authority checker

Website authority checker by Ahrefs

11. Pitch yourself as a podcast guest 

Using podcasts as a promotional tactic works similarly to guest blogging: You talk about a topic relevant to your product, and that gives you an opportunity to introduce it to the audience. Plus, you can land a quality link too. 

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Podcast example that acts as product promotion

But the difference here is that the mere fact you’ve been invited to star on a podcast makes you and everything you do interesting. So I’d say it can help to generate awareness of your product even if it’s mentioned only in the description of the episode. 

That said, the best podcast topics will be the ones that:

  • Appeal to the podcast’s audience.
  • Haven’t been covered already.
  • Align with your experience.
How to find the best podcast topics

And here’s a neat trick for finding uncovered topics (courtesy of Respona): use Google search operators. For instance, site:podcast.everyonehatesmarketers.com AND "omnichannel marketing" shows that this topic hasn’t been covered by the host of the show. 

Using Google search operators to find uncovered topics by any podcast

12. Introduce a referral program 

A referral program is a marketing tactic that encourages users to advocate your product in exchange for rewards such as cash, freebies, or product upgrades. 

You’ve probably heard about some big companies like Dropbox, PayPal, or Uber using referral marketing. But don’t think this tactic is only restricted to big companies like them. In fact, referral programs were implemented in the early stages of these businesses and were found to be a crucial factor in their growth.

PayPal referral program: 2001 and now
PayPal in 2001 (left) and now (right). Even after over 20 years, it still uses the referral program.

Statistically, a referral from a friend, family member, or colleague is one of the most effective ways to acquire customers since word of mouth is one of the most trustworthy marketing channels (source). 

It can also be one of the most cost-effective ways to acquire customers, but it all comes down to the cost of your program. 

To make your referral program successful, you need to consider three things.

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First, the attractiveness of the reward. What will be more attractive to your users: a discount on their next purchase, an upgrade, or maybe a charity donation? Consider also two-way rewards: for the referrer and the referee. 

Secondly, be careful about the cost of the reward to your business. PayPal basically gave out cash for signing up because the company figured out it’d be less expensive than ads. Indeed, it led to rapid growth, but you can imagine how much they spent without a promise of revenue. It’s a better idea to reward users who perform a specific action closely tied to your revenue. 

Also, consider the customer acquisition cost (aka CAC) of other marketing tactics. Use this as a benchmark; ideally, you want to keep the CAC of your referral program lower than other tactics. 

However, discretion is advised here. If you see that the users who come via referrals stay longer or spend more, a higher CAC could be justifiable. 

On a last note, referral programs may be tough to operate without dedicated software that generates referral links and allows you to track them. So consider a tool like ReferralCandy or Viral Loops

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13. Show what early adopters say 

Last but not least, you can share positive feedback from early adopters of your product.

This way, you’ll build social proof that will establish your credibility and increase the likelihood of people signing up for your product or even buying it. I’m talking about sharing:

  • Quotes
  • Rankings
  • Awards 
  • Case studies 
  • Photos and videos from customers 

Some popular spots for placing social proof are sign-up forms, pricing pages, and product feature tours. But you can also experiment with their placement and see their impact on conversion. 

Customer testimonial example

It’s great if you have testimonials from high-profile influencers or celebrities, but the truth is the voice of “regular users” matters too. I’d argue that a product’s ability to consistently meet the needs of its regular users is more valuable than a few endorsements from famous people.

Final thoughts 

If you can’t spend a lot of money on product promotion, don’t fret. You’ll find more than enough ideas that don’t rely on ads.

However, this doesn’t mean you need to give up ads completely. Something you can consider is reinvesting part of your revenue to try advertising tactics such as: 

  • Advertising on non-obvious platforms like Quora (case study). 
  • Targeting niche keywords with low cost per click but possibly high business potential.
  • Using dayparting (available in Google Ads). 
  • Optimizing conversion on your landing page. 
  • Increasing ad quality score to reduce the cost of bids.

Got questions or comments? Ping me on Twitter or Mastodon.

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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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