SEO
15 Podcasts to Boost Your SEO Game
I have serious commitment issues when it comes to podcasts (and books and TV series, for that matter).
That’s because I’m a firm believer in being fussy about what I give my time to. And having tuned in to various SEO podcasts in the past month, I must say 15 of them won my fancy.
From broader discussions on SEO to more technical deep-dives, there’s something for every kind of marketer. So listen closely, and don’t forget to vote for your favorite.
1. The Authority Hacker Podcast
Hosts: Gael Breton, Mark Webster
Topics: SEO, marketing, content marketing
Frequency: Every two weeks
Website: Authority Hacker
Listen on: Spotify, Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher
This well-loved podcast is equal parts casual and informative. Gael Breton and Mark Webster make a convivial pair, and it’s easy to keep listening as the hosts discuss all things SEO in between witty banter.
Having produced over 250 episodes now, their ability to keep the content fresh impresses us. Apart from covering Google updates, Gael and Mark tackle SEO questions and share their experiences running authority websites and blogs—including how they built and sold one of their websites for a six-figure sum.
Here’s another episode we found interesting, featuring SEO and content marketing consultant Stacey MacNaught.
2. Search Off the Record
Host: Google’s Search Relations team
Topics: SEO, tech SEO
Frequency: Weekly
Website: Search Off the Record, Twitter
Listen on: Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, Search Off the Record
Curious about the inner workings of Google Search? Search Off the Record takes you behind the scenes, with episodes centering on launches, Google Search Console feature prioritizations, and projects that Google Search teams are working on.
The show’s ideal for anyone who’s curious about life as a Googler too: The hosts occasionally share what it’s like working for the tech major.
Informative as the podcast may be, the episodes border on technical territory—spanning JavaScript, robots.txt, and Core Web Vitals. To further your learning, transcripts are shared on the official website.
3. Experts On The Wire
Host: Dan Shure
Topics: SEO, digital marketing
Frequency: Monthly
Website: Experts On The Wire
Listen: Apple Podcasts, Stitcher
Dan Shure knows how to make a good show. Before founding boutique agency Evolving SEO in 2010, he produced TV shows and was a performing musician.
Naturally, he doesn’t disappoint as the host of Experts On The Wire. The monthly podcast features industry practitioners who discuss the tools, tactics, and people shaping the world of search marketing—from Backlinko founder Brian Dean to entrepreneur Everette Taylor.
Don’t expect regular episodes, though. Dan published just four episodes in 2021 and seven episodes in 2020. Still, the podcast makes for enjoyable listening and is ideal for SEOs of all experience levels.
4. The Recipe for SEO Success
Host: Kate Toon
Topics: SEO, social media, content marketing
Frequency: Every two weeks
Website: The Recipe for SEO Success
Listen on: Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher
Here’s an SEO podcast with a difference: Kate Toon labels each episode “newbie” or “techie” so that you can easily identify those most suited to your level of knowledge. As a host, she’s at once chirpy and engaging, qualities which make for easy listening.
Apart from offering succinct tips on content marketing and website-building, Kate invites SEO experts to share their recommendations and personal experiences on her show. Past guests include Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, and Bill Slawski—so you’re guaranteed to learn something new every time.
5. The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing
Hosts: Chris Burres, Matt Bertram
Topics: SEO, PPC, social media, content marketing, CRO
Frequency: Every two weeks
Website: Best SEO Podcast
Listen on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Podomatic
Since its founding in 2009, The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing has received more than 3.6 million downloads. So suffice to say, the podcast has a strong fanbase.
Hosts Chris Burres and Matt Bertram originally created the podcast to complement their training courses on digital marketing agency EWR Digital, which they also founded. But when they realized quality SEO podcasts were few and far between, they sought to fill that gap.
The show today has over 500 episodes, with new ones added around every two weeks via a livestream on YouTube and Facebook.
We like the breadth and depth of topics covered; think Google algorithm updates to discussions on enterprise SEO, local SEO, and branded and non-branded traffic. Guests like Lemuel Park and Matthew Royse have weighed in too, ensuring each episode is kept fresh with well-balanced perspectives.
6. SEO 101 Podcast
Hosts: Ross Dunn, John Carcutt
Topics: SEO, paid search
Frequency: Every three weeks
Website: SEO 101
Listen on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Soundcloud, Stitcher, iHeartRadio
Despite its name, we reckon SEO 101 Podcast is ideal for marketers of all levels.
The topics covered are generally less technical in nature—think keyword research tips and Google core updates—but this WMR.FM-run show is ideal if you’re looking to revisit the basics or build a better foundation.
And no better hosts to lead the show than Ross Dunn and John Carcutt, who’ve been in the SEO industry for over 20 years. With Ross’ focus on small and medium businesses and John’s on enterprises and large companies, they each bring unique perspectives and a touch of humor to the table.
Past guests include Moz’s Dr. Pete Meyers and Loren Baker (who’s incidentally co-host of The Search Engine Journal Show!).
The best bit is each episode averages just 30 minutes, making it ideal listening for your next commute or workout.
7. Work in SEO
Host: Isaline Muelhauser
Topics: SEO, tech SEO
Frequency: Weekly
Website: Work in SEO
Listen on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts
What are the best ways to navigate a career in SEO?
There isn’t a sound answer to that, and founder Isaline Muelhauser knows it. Her new weekly podcast hopes to fill this gap by bringing in guests of diverse backgrounds to share how they’ve navigated the marketing space.
Isaline isn’t afraid to ask the tough questions either—and has plans to cover both foundational topics and bolder ground. These include handling harassment and bullying, starting an SEO career at the age of 60, and what it’s like to be an outreach specialist.
If you’re curious to learn more about this newly launched show, tune in to the first episode. There, Isaline discusses her motivations behind starting the project, how she wound up in the SEO space, and the challenges she has faced.
The namesake podcast is part of a bigger project: the Work in SEO job search platform.
8. TechSEO Podcast
Host: Keira Davidson
Topics: Tech SEO, link building
Frequency: Monthly
Website: TechSEO Podcast
Listen on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Breaker, Google Podcasts
This monthly podcast focuses strictly on technical SEO. Clearly, its aim isn’t to reach as wide an audience as possible. Rather, it’s to help marketing specialists deepen their expertise.
The show’s helmed by Keira Davidson, who took over former hosts Dan Taylor and Adam Gent—and she’s a great conversationalist. I found myself listening with a keen ear as she discussed everything from large-scale migrations to automated SEO testing.
Notable guests who have graced the show include Sören Bendig and Katherine Watier Ong. In all, the podcast’s practical tips and insights are guaranteed to give you some useful takeaways.
9. Voices of Search
Host: Benjamin Shapiro
Topics: SEO, tech SEO, content marketing
Frequency: Every other day
Website: Voices of Search
Listen on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts
Looking for succinct SEO tips but short on time to trawl the web? Apart from turning to Twitter, an alternative lies in Voices of Search.
This podcast focuses on SEO and content marketing, with near-daily episodes spanning 10 to 20 minutes. Given the low commitment required per sitting, it’s far easier to listen attentively as host Benjamin Shapiro tackles all the useful stuff, such as:
- Optimizing how-to content.
- Identifying the best content formats for your audience.
- Mobile SEO changes.
- How social media impacts SEO.
I like how clear-cut the conversations are. Notable guests include Dmitry Dragilev, founder of JustReachOut.io, and Bill King, founder and host of GTO Podcast (a show for growth marketers).
10. SEO Podcast
Host: Timothy Carter
Topics: SEO, tech SEO, link building, PPC, social media marketing
Frequency: Daily (weekdays only)
Website: SEO.co
Listen on: Spotify, Google Podcasts
What does it take to outrank your competition? That’s something host Timothy Carter attempts to address in SEO Podcast, which has bite-sized episodes that never exceed eight minutes each. This makes his points at once informative and digestible.
The best bit is there are daily episodes (except for weekends), giving you something to regularly look forward to.
While there isn’t any banter, given this is a one-man show, I reckon both entry-level marketers and experienced SEOs will benefit from tuning in. The podcast is easily one of the most well-paced shows I’ve come across, with useful tips that are often split into two-part episodes.
These include the beginner’s guide to Google Search Console, the difference between web design and web development, and how to avoid bad content and poor blogging habits.
Timothy brings with him over 20 years of internet marketing experience and produces the show under content marketing agency SEO.co.
11. SEO for the Rest of Us
Host: Brendan Hufford
Topics: SEO, tech SEO, content marketing
Frequency: Infrequent
Website: SEO for the Rest of Us
Listen on: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts
This show isn’t about SEO—not really, anyway. Rather, the podcast aims to explore how entrepreneurs can grow their products and services using SEO, with the goal of achieving financial freedom.
That’s according to founder and host Brendan Hufford, who is candid and generous in talking about his experiences in the marketing space. He’s also an entertaining podcaster and keeps things light-hearted and casual with guest speakers.
Some of my favorites include:
The show makes for great listening, but episodes are not released on a fixed schedule. While we wait in eager anticipation, go ahead and stream the existing content. There’s much to be learned—and you’ll have an entertaining time while you’re at it.
12. The Search Engine Journal Show
Hosts: Brent Csutoras, Danny Goodwin, Loren Baker
Topics: SEO, paid search, social media, entrepreneurship, content marketing
Frequency: Every two weeks
Website: The Search Engine Journal Show
Listen on: Spotify, Apple Podcasts
Formerly known as Marketing Nerds—and, later, Search Engine Nerds—this twice-monthly show has evolved since its launch in 2014 to become a go-to for SEO professionals. And for good reason too, given the caliber of guests who have graced the podcast. These include Google’s Gary Illyes, Bing’s Christi Olson, and Snap Inc., Canada’s Matt McGowen.
In addition to roping in SEO experts to discuss trending topics, such as futureproofing your SEO practices, the hosts run occasional giveaways and contests.
We reckon this show is best suited to seasoned SEOs. The conversations can get a little technical, as in the case of this episode on enterprise site crawl management.
13. Crawling Mondays
Host: Aleyda Solis
Topics: SEO, tech SEO, link building
Frequency: Monthly
Website: AleydaSolis.com
Listen on: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Anchor
This monthly YouTube-to-podcast show is hosted by Aleyda Solis, whose strong following on Twitter speaks of her experience.
Apart from being the founder of digital marketing consultancy Orainti and remote work platform Remoters, Aleyda dedicates her time to making Crawling Mondays a podcast worth your while.
Episodes feature a mix of SEO reviews, interviews, and related news—along with how-to tips on building a winning SEO strategy, doing local SEO, and project management for agencies.
I particularly like the quality of guests who have come on the show, including Lisa Paasche, Areej AbuAli, and Marie Haynes. Here’s one featuring our very own Patrick Stox:
14. WTSPodcast
Hosts: Sarah McDowell, Areej AbuAli
Topics: SEO, tech SEO
Frequency: Weekly
Website: Women in Tech SEO
Listen on: Spotify
Speaking of Areej, what can’t she do? The WTSPodcast is an extension of the founder’s networking platform, Women in Tech SEO, which comprises a growing marketing community for women in the technical SEO field.
In the WTSPodcast, Areej and marketer Sarah McDowell take turns hosting episodes and tackling all manner of topics, including:
By bringing in insights from women marketers of all backgrounds, the conversations are easy enough for almost anyone to follow—even non-SEOs.
15. Webcology
Hosts: Jim Hedger, Dave Davies
Topics: SEO, digital marketing
Frequency: Weekly
Website: Webcology
Listen on: Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher
Here’s another weekly podcast by WMR.FM for your consideration. Unlike the SEO 101 Podcast, this show examines the wider digital marketing ecosystem and how webmasters and marketers can get better at what they do.
Jim Hedger and Dave Davies have great camaraderie—they have been running the show for more than a decade, after all. Though, their lively conversations can get rather technical and may be harder for fledgling marketers to follow.
For instance, recent episodes discuss what it takes to rank in Google Discover, Google core updates, mobile-first indexing, and Google Knowledge Panel management.
We also like the discussions with industry experts on everything from mobile marketing consolidation to tackling targeting in a post-IDFA world.
Final thoughts
Even if podcasts have never been your thing, we guarantee the ones on this list are worthy of your time and attention.
You’ll also pick up heaps of useful tips, so keep a notebook (or your phone) handy while listening. And remember: It’s good to be picky. Read the episode synopsis, listen selectively, and save your favorites so that you can easily return to them.
Did I miss any out? Share your thoughts with me on Twitter.
SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO
Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.
However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.
Ways to Optimize Older Content
Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort.
Refresh Content
If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.
Rewrite Old Blog Posts
When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely.
This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.
Delete Old Blog Posts
You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it.
Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.
Promote Old Blog Posts
Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.
Which Blog Posts Should You Update?
Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit.
Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.
If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings.
Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic.
With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.
How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.
Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.
Conduct New Keyword Research
Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic.
Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too.
Look for New Ranking Opportunities
When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it.
Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags
If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags.
Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made.
Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page.
Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags.
Replace Outdated Information and Statistics
Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.
Tighten or Expand Ideas
Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more.
Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:
- Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
- Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
- Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
- Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
- Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
- Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
- Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.
Improve Visuals and Other Media
No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality.
Update Internal and External Links
Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.
You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.
Optimize for Conversions
When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years.
So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.
Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post.
Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.
Key Takeaway
Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions.
By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero
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