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15 Project Management Tools For SEO Professionals

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15 Project Management Tools For SEO Professionals

Search engine optimization is complex.

Between changes to search algorithms, new keywords, and strategic changes made by competitors, the field is in a constant state of flux.

If you’re like most SEO pros, at any given time, you’re juggling numerous projects, plans, and tasks.

Just staying organized can feel like a full-time job in itself.

Luckily, you can put technology to work for you in the form of project management (PM) tools.

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Why SEO Professionals Need Project Management Tools

If you’re already using a project management platform, you undoubtedly recognize the benefits it provides for busy digital marketers and web teams.

If you’re still getting by without one, you should get one as soon as possible. Why you ask?

Because it can uncomplicate your life and help you get more done in less time.

Some of the essential functions a good project management platform provides for SEO professionals are:

  • Accurate planning. From a bird’s eye view of all your campaigns to detailed information on how a specific keyword performs, SEO project management software allows you to create structured plans.
  • Task and time management. Whether you’re working solo or as part of a team, PM tools allow you to assign tasks and receive notifications about them, so you can more accurately work hours. This can also be used to generate accurate invoices for your clients.
  • Resource allocation. An SEO PM software will give you at-a-glance information about where your budget and resources are going. Useful for SEO, it’s also extremely helpful if you’re also running pay-per-click ads.
  • Reporting. Most modern PM platforms offer robust reporting features and dashboards, so you can generate and analyze data to improve efficiency.

It’s easy to see why so many SEO professionals have turned to PM platforms to help them stay organized and productive, but there are a lot of options.

How do you know which one is right for you and your team?

We’ve compiled a list of some of the top ones. Below, you’ll find our choices for the 15 best PM tools with a brief overview of each, including pros and cons.

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Our Top 15 Project Management Platforms For SEO

1. Asana

The PM platform used by Search Engine Journal, Asana is a personal favourite.

This cloud-based platform provides a virtual workspace from which your team and various stakeholders can collaborate.

It’s useful for SEO and digital marketing because it allows you to clearly set and manage strategies, goals, tasks, and expectations.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Task management: Using the forms feature, you can create standard workflows customized to your SEO processes.
  • Automated workflow: Rules-based automation can replace tedious manual tasks.
  • Reporting features: Asana has dashboards, charts, and graphs with real-time reporting, so you can get a high-level view or dive into the details.
  • Free for up to 15 users: Asana has a free tier that can be used by teams of 15 or less. It includes unlimited tasks, messages, projects, and 100MB of storage for each user.
  • Integrations: Asana plays nice with more than 100 other apps and platforms, including Microsoft Office, Dropbox, and Salesforce.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Unintuitive design: If you’ve never used Asana before, it can be a little challenging to figure out. However, once you’ve mastered the learning curve, it’s quite easy to use.
  • No time tracking functionality: There is no built-in time tracking functionality in this platform. This can cause complications in billing clients or resource allocation.
  • Not ideal for small teams: With a range of advanced features and capabilities, it can be overwhelming for small teams or limited SEO projects.

 2. Monday.com

Garfield may hate Mondays, but SEO professionals who use Monday.com for project management sure don’t.

With an operating system that can be customized to your preferred workflow, it’s a great choice for smaller SEO teams looking for a tool to help them stay on track.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

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  • Clean user interface: Monday.com has a clean interface that allows you to customize your dashboard and extend data in columns. You can easily get multiple views of an SEO project including calendars, Kanban boards, and collateral.
  • Templates: Monday.com has many templates to choose from, so you will likely find one that matches your workflow.
  • Notifications and communication: This platform streamlines team communication. Team members can leave comments on tasks or documents and stakeholders can be notified via email.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Steep learning curve: Like many PM platforms, it can be challenging to get the hang of Monday.com. Bigger tasks with more communication can begin to get a bit unwieldy.
  • Slow dashboard loading: It can take some time for your Monday.com dashboard to load, particularly on larger projects where a lot of data has to be transferred from its servers to your computer.
  • Client licenses not included: If you want to invite clients to participate in your workspace, you will need to buy a license for them.

3. GanttPro

For more than a century, PM professionals have been using Gantt Charts to track their project schedules.

GanttPro is a web-based PM solution based around these visual trackers.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Readily understandable: You don’t have to have a project management certificate to track tasks with GanttPro. It gives you status information in an easy-to-understand visual format.
  • Undo functionality: A simple mistake doesn’t have to derail your project because this tool saves your history and lets you undo actions with CTRL + Z.
  • Customizable fields: You can create custom fields for every task.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Not as many integrations: Unlike other PM platforms, GanttPro is light on integrations with other apps.
  • No billing or invoicing tools: You will need an outside program to generate invoices for your SEO services.
  • Manual date input: Changing dates for benchmarks and project completion must be input manually, which some users find tedious.

4. Trello

One of the most popular platforms for project management, Trello uses boards, lists, and cards to help keep you organized.

With a free basic plan, it is useful for SEO teams of all sizes.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Free basic plan: Your entire team can try Trello for free. If you like it, there are premium plans available that add integrations, automation, and other functionality.
  • Intuitive Kanban boards: Trello’s drag-and-drop card system makes it easy to track the status of any project.
  • Useful for campaigns of all sizes: Trello works just as well for huge, complex campaigns as it does for simple projects.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Kanban-reliant: If you don’t like to use Kanban boards, this is not the PM tool for you, as most of its functionality is built around them.
  • Upload sizes limited: Trello restricts free users to 10 MB of online storage and paid users to 250 MB. For most SEO teams this probably won’t be a problem, but you may differ.
  • Timeline relationships are not always clear: Trello does not allow users to manipulate relationships for a better understanding of how they work together.

5. Teamwork

Another Kanban-based PM tool, Teamwork offers a drag-and-drop interface with more advanced reporting features.

Teamwork lets you create custom branding accounts, which is useful if you’re working on more than one client.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

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  • Unlimited users: You can add any number of users to a single task.
  • Clear vision of scope: Teamwork’s board view makes it easy to understand what is going on with each project.
  • Repeating tasks: Teamwork lets you simply copy any task, which is especially useful for SEO professionals.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Can be overwhelming: The upside is Teamwork has a lot of features. The downside is all those features can get confusing, especially when you’re a new user.
  • No in-platform chat functionality: You’ll need to use an outside app to “chat” with your team and/or stakeholders.

6. Zoho Projects

A cloud-based platform, Zoho Projects provides the functionality you need to manage several SEO projects at once.

You can choose from a limited free version with basic features and four premium plans with different features and user caps.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Communication tools: Zoho Project has real-time chat and forum pages, so you can quickly and easily share information with your team.
  • Timekeeping: If you bill your SEO clients by the hour, this platform is a good choice because it has excellent time tracking functionality.
  • At-a-glance-info: Zoho makes it easy to spot delays, lags, and bottlenecks.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Features can be overwhelming: Because it offers so much functionality, some users may be intimidated by this PM platform. It also has a steeper learning curve.
  • Inflexible: It can be difficult to customize projects to your needs with this platform.

7. Wrike

Wrike can help you simplify planning while keeping your SEO projects on track.

Customizable workflows and ample communication options help you reduce emails, meetings and status updates.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Task prioritization: With Wrike, you can push critical tasks to the front to make sure you don’t miss deadlines.
  • Natural workflow: Wrike is structured in a way most people will find logical and easy to use.
  • Advanced features: Functionality for task management, Gantt charts and real-time newsfeed is built-in.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Pricier than some options: There is a free version available with limited functionality, but premium plans with more functions are more expensive than other PM tools.
  • Difficult onboarding new users: Adding new users and assigning tasks to them must be done manually, which can be time-consuming.
  • Can be difficult to navigate: Users who are unfamiliar with Wrike may have difficulty navigating projects.

8. Smartsheet

With project and work management tools, Smartsheet is an online work execution platform that allows you to automate tasks and generate real-time visuals, including Gantt charts and dashboards.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Robust communication and collaboration: Smartsheet makes it easy to create and implement communication plans.
  • Adding tasks and dependencies: Smartsheet has an intuitive design that allows you to add tasks and dependencies with ease.
  • Custom dashboards: Set up your dash to display the information you want.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Doesn’t support detailed documents: Users are only allowed to upload 10 documents per ticket, which can be troublesome for highly specific campaigns.
  • May be too simple for larger teams: If you’re overseeing a big team with many stakeholders, you may find this platform doesn’t include all the functionality you want.

9. Celoxis

Designed to be an all-in-one PM platform for enterprise-level organizations, Celoxis has nearly all the functionality an SEO professional could ever want.

It has high-level visibility and numerous reports, to help your campaigns stay on track and on budget.

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Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Easy to use: Celoxis gives you the tools to dive deep into a project, without sacrificing usability. It’s also easy to set up.
  • Includes time tracking, resource management, and budgeting: It also has ample reporting features to keep you on track.
  • Good value: Celoxis offers the functionality of a top-tier PM platform at the price point of a mid-tier one.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • No billing or invoicing functionality: You will have to use an outside program to bill your clients.
  • No free version: If you’re looking for a free-to-use PM platform for your SEO team, this isn’t it.

10. ProofHub

ProofHub doesn’t have as many features as some other PM platforms, but it’s still a good fit for SEO.

It provides a centralized hub for task lists, workflows, calendars, and documents.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • All the tools you need: ProofHub gives you everything you need for SEO planning, team collaboration, and management.
  • Unlimited users: You can add as many people to the platform as you need.
  • Communication: All discussions can be centralized in one place thanks to built-in chat and document sharing features.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Recurring tasks must be entered manually: ProofHub does not provide you with the option to repeat tasks.
  • No budgeting: You will need to use a third-party platform to oversee budgeting for your SEO tasks.

11. ClickUp

ClickUp is a cloud-based platform that combines centralized company information and business tools in one place.

It allows you to create and manage to-do lists, workflows, and schedules in a variety of formats.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Easy to use: ClickUp has a short learning curve, meaning you and your team can start benefiting from it faster.
  • Multiple views: Track your campaigns via a list, board, calendar, and workload view, among others.
  • Perfect balance of functions and ease of use: ClickUp falls in the Goldilocks zone by including the features you want without the complexity.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Navigation can be confusing: The differences between tabs is subtle.
  • Implementation can require significant planning: Because it’s highly customizable, you may have to systematically plan workflows to maximize ClickUp’s benefits.

12. Forecast

With Forecast, you can put all your SEO projects, resources, and budgeting in one convenient tool.

An AI-native platform can significantly reduce your administrative workload.

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Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Easily track the lifecycle of projects: You can assign and allocate tasks and budget for your entire SEO PM operation through this platform.
  • Schedule visualization: You can get information on a team member’s workload at a glance.
  • Gathering data is easy: Want to compare a current campaign to an old one? Forecast makes it easy to pull data.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Updating time and task entries can be tedious: Manual entry can be a time-consuming process.
  • Not ideal for larger teams: Visualization elements can be overwhelming if you have a lot of people working under you.

13. Adobe Workfront

Adobe’s solution for project management needs, Workfront is configurable to your needs and includes extensive integrations, so you can easily track the latest developments in your SEO projects.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Well-designed user interface: Workfront is easy to use and visually appealing.
  • Real-time information: It keeps you abreast of any status changes.
  • Good transparency: This platform helps eliminate confusion about who is supposed to do what, as stakeholders and project scope are easily visible.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Lengthy setup process: A high level of customization means Workfront requires a more in-depth initial setup.
  • May offer too much detail: With Workfront, you can get as granular into tasks as you like, which may lead to some people becoming lost in the details.
  • Finding tasks can be difficult: If you don’t know what project a task is assigned to, it can be difficult to locate.

14. WorkOtter

With WorkOtter, you can plan resources for your SEO campaigns at a project, rather than task level.

One of the easiest PM platforms to use, it’s an excellent choice for SEO work.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

  • Very easy to use: You don’t have to be a tech wiz to use WorkOtter for SEO project management.
  • Good communication and reporting tools: Real-time information keeps your entire team on the same page.
  • Good for resource management: This platform is useful for deciding exactly where your SEO resources will be allocated.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Cloud-only: There is no local version available, which can be problematic if you are trying to work offline.
  • English-only support: This may present challenges for non-native English speakers.

15. PSOHub

This versatile PM platform is as useful for SEO teams as it is for architect firms or financial companies.

It has predictive project management to allow you to more accurately project how your SEO campaigns will run.

Why It’s Good For SEO:

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  • Excellent time tracking functionality: PSOHub is one of the best platforms for tracking where your team’s time is going, on both group and individual levels.
  • CRM Integrations: This platform integrates with Hubspot and other CRMs, so you can track your SEO campaigns alongside email initiatives.
  • Flexible reporting: PSOHub lets you choose the data you want to include in reports.

Potential Drawbacks For SEO:

  • Time-consuming setup process: It can take some time to manually enter all your campaigns and tasks into this platform.
  • All users must have the same license level: You cannot have some users on a basic level and others on a more complex one.

How To Pick The Right PM Tool For Your SEO Needs

We’ve given you 15 different project management options that can work for your needs as an SEO professional. But how do you pick the right one for you?

It all comes down to your specific needs. Any of these platforms will help you streamline your operations, manage campaigns more effectively, and eliminate wasted time. But each of them has slightly different functionality.

It’s up to you to decide what will work best for your needs. But hopefully, by this point, we’ve given you enough information to get started.


Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal



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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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