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15+ Technical SEO Interview Questions for Your Next Hires

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15+ Technical SEO Interview Questions for Your Next Hires

Technical SEO requires technical and analytical skills together with a good understanding of how Google and other search engines work.

A technical SEO must be familiar with the most popular CMS systems and know at least the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

In addition to that, a good technical SEO should know the fundamental rules of SEO and be able to identify if a website breaks these rules.

Finally, a technical SEO must be able to offer possible fixes to the problems identified on the website and be able to determine whether the fixes were implemented correctly.

But how can you verify that your next technical SEO hire has these skills and knowledge?

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In this article, you’ll find 15 sample job interview questions that will help you decide whether the person you are interviewing is the right candidate for a technical SEO position.

Let’s get started!

1. How Do You Check Whether A URL Is Indexed By Google?

The site: command is the simplest way to quickly check if a given URL is in Google’s index.

Every technical SEO should know the site: command and, ideally, a bunch of other Google search operators that allow for filtering and narrowing search results.

In addition, you may also ask the candidate how they would check how many pages are indexed by Google and what the most accurate way of doing that is.

Here your ideal technical SEO hire should demonstrate familiarity with the Google Search Console Coverage report and indicate how it differs from the site: command.

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Screenshot from search for [searchenginejournal.com], Google, July 2021

2. How Do You Block A URL From Being Indexed?

With this question, you want to see whether your potential technical SEO hire actually knows the purpose of a no-index tag and does not confuse it with blocking a page in robots.txt.

They should know that robots.txt is for controlling and optimizing crawling while no-index tags are for keeping pages out of Google’s index.

In addition, you may also ask about the best ways to protect a page from being accessed by everyone, including curious people (i.e. protecting it with a password in addition to adding a no-index tag).

If the person says that you should block such a page in robots.txt, then it means they still have a lot of SEO homework to do.

3. What Are The Most Important SEO Ranking Factors, In Your Opinion?

Of course, there is no definitive answer to this question. But hearing the person’s perspective on Google ranking factors may tell you a lot about their knowledge & experience.

A good technical SEO specialist candidate will:

  • Back up their answers with data or – better – data based on their own experience or SEO tests they performed.
  • Be willing to show you their own websites and talk about the SEO strategies they used to grow the sites.
  • Avoid absolute statements (e.g. these things are Google SEO rankings factors with this amount of weighing for every website).
  • Understand the difference between correlation and causation.
  • Not be afraid of saying “it depends” or “I don’t know” where it makes sense.

4. What SEO Myths Have You Had Enough Of?

Only a person with at least some knowledge and understanding of SEO will be able to answer that question.

A complete newbie in many cases will often present SEO myths as ultimate SEO truths without offering any of their own insights and commentary.

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If you are looking for an experienced technical SEO expert, ask them to elaborate on their favorite SEO myths and how they deal with them on a daily basis.

5. What Is Your Favorite Website Crawler And Why?

Website crawlers are probably the most important tools for technical SEOs.

You want to make sure that your future technical SEO uses a bunch of different SEO crawlers (both desktop and cloud-based), knows how to use them efficiently, and is able to perform advanced SEO analyses with their help.

Screaming Frog SEO SpiderScreenshot from Screaming Frog, February 2022

For example, everyone can plug the domain name into the crawler and start the crawl but only an experienced technical SEO expert will know:

  • How to configure the crawl to check exactly what they want to analyze (e.g. check the PSI metrics in bulk for all pages).
  • How to execute JavaScript to compare the rendered HTML with the source HTML.
  • How to change the user agent if the crawl does not want to start.
  • How to actually interpret the data the crawler presents.
  • How to prioritize the issues the crawler highlights.

You want your next technical SEO specialist to be familiar with all or most of the most popular crawlers, such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Deepcrawl, JetOctopus, etc.

6. How Do You Analyze Page Speed And Core Web Vitals?

Your potential technical SEO hire should use both the Google PageSpeed Insights tool (the Google Lighthouse report) and the Core Web Vitals report in Google Search Console to analyze the speed and performance of the site before drawing any conclusions or giving recommendations.

The point with this question is to check that the person:

  • Really knows the difference between lab data (the data provided by Google Lighthouse) and field data (the data provided by the CrUX report) and knows which ones to prioritize (i.e. field data).
  • Knows when it’s best to use the GSC Core Web Vitals report (i.e. to check pages in bulk) and the PSI tool (to get an overview of one specific page, usually the homepage).
mobile performance reportScreenshot from Google Search Console, February 2022

Ideally, your candidate also knows other speed and performance tools, such as GTmetrix or WebPageTest, and knows how to use crawlers to analyze the lab performance of pages in bulk.

7. What Are Some Quick Technical SEO Wins?

In this question, you want your potential SEO hire to draw on their experience.

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Even though there is no best answer here, you want to see that the person can really differentiate between low-impact, high-impact, low-effort, and high-effort technical SEO optimizations.

For example, it always makes a huge difference if you compress images on the website and convert them to JPEG or WEBP. Meanwhile, it may not really help a lot to rebuild the entire website (and use a ton of resources in the process) to get it from 92/100 score to 98/100 in PSI.

Sometimes a huge technical SEO win will be simply to get rid of that 10 MB image that loads on every page instead of asking developers to recode the site to save 0.1 s by better optimizing JavaScript.

8. A Site That’s Been Online 9 Months Is Getting Zero Traffic. Why?

Ask for the possible reasons that come to mind.

Sometimes the solutions to problems in SEO are simple – for example, the site has no organic traffic because a no-index tag has not been removed or simply GA is not working correctly.

Other times, they require a ton of technical and data analysis that goes well beyond checking the indexability of pages.

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With this question, you want the person to demonstrate their ability to look for solutions, think critically, and be creative.

Performance ReportScreenshot from Google Analytics, February 2022

9. How Do You Check If Googlebot May Have Problems Accessing Site Content?

A good technical SEO expert must know something about JavaScript rendering and the potential problems that JavaScript-based websites may face.

Here you want the person to demonstrate:

  • At least basic knowledge of the topic of SEO & JavaScript (i.e. their familiarity with Martin Splitt from Google).
  • Their knowledge of tools that allow for comparing rendered HTML with source HTML, such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Rendertron, and – obviously – the URL Inspection tool in GSC.

10. What Example Errors May An XML Sitemap Have And How Would You Handle Them?

I see people focus too much on XML sitemaps with small websites (a couple of hundreds of URLs or less) and too little on that for huge sites (multi-million-page sites).

When it comes to XML sitemaps, you want your next technical SEO hire to show that they know:

  • What XML errors can be classified as low-impact (e.g. using deprecated parameters) and high-impact (e.g. indicating non-indexable pages).
  • When it is important to put a lot of focus on the XML sitemap (e.g. with huge sites that may have indexability and crawlability issues as opposed to small websites).
  • How to use XML sitemaps to improve and optimize the crawl budget of the site.
  • What pages should be included in the sitemap and how different CMS systems generate XML sitemaps.

11. How Do You Perform A Technical SEO Audit?

With the help of this question, you want to check if the person has their own SEO process for auditing a website.

Do they use a set of different tools to do that? Or do they rely on a fully automated audit where the tool (not the person) decides what issues the site has and what their priorities are?

At this point, you may also:

  • Ask the person to show you the examples of technical SEO audits they have performed.
  • Get them to explain how they approached particular issues.
  • And have them talk about the results their recommendations brought (if they have been implemented).

12. You Discovered That A Website Has Hundreds Of Duplicate Pages. What Do You Do?

With this question, again, you want the person to demonstrate their critical thinking abilities and desire to look for solutions.

There is no right answer here but an experienced technical SEO specialist should mention the following in their answers:

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  • Checking the index status of these pages to make sure that these duplicates actually create a problem.
  • Checking the user-declared and Google-selected canonicals for these pages (possibly with the new URL Inspection Tool API).
  • Checking where these pages are in the internal linking structure of the website.

In addition, you may also ask the person when duplicate content is not an issue and how to check if the site actually has this problem.

If the person is saying that the site may get penalized for duplicate content, it means they have some catching up to do.

13. What Do You Use Google Search Console For? What’s Your Favorite Use Of That Tool?

Google Search Console, in most cases, should be the number one SEO tool for technical SEOs.

You want your future technical SEO hire to share with you how they use the tool and how it helps them to achieve their SEO goals.

Google Search Console coverage reportScreenshot from Google Search Console, February 2022

There is no single correct answer to that question again but you probably want them to mention the following:

  • The Coverage report and what its specific buckets are for.
  • The Page Experience report and its limitations.
  • The Crawl Stats report and how it can be used to analyze how Google crawls the website.
  • The Security report and how you can use GSC to check if a site has been infected.
  • Ways to use GSC to analyze internal linking.

14. How Do You Check If The Site Uses Structured Data And Whether It Is Valid?

Structured data can be a specialty itself within SEO but you still want your technical SEO to:

  • Be familiar with tools, such as Schema Markup Validator and Google Rich Results Test and know the difference between them,
  • Know how to use crawlers, such as Screaming Frog or Sitebulb to analyze structured data in bulk for many pages,
  • Be familiar with SEO Chrome extensions like Detailed SEO that allow for quickly looking up what types of structured data are used on a particular page.

Here, you may also ask the person about the difference between structured data, rich results, and featured snippets.

People often confuse these.

15. What Are Your Favorite SEO Resources?

This is a totally open question but the more resources the person cites, the geekier they are.

An absolute must is that they are familiar with Google Search Central, read the Google SEO documentation, and watch the SEO office hours with John Mueller.

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Google Search CentralScreenshot from Google Search Central, February 2022

If you hire an SEO geek, you can be sure they will never miss any meaningful SEO news and will be happy to test and implement new strategies.

Bonus: Yes Or No Questions

Open questions are great for seeing how a person thinks and how deep their knowledge actually is.

However, yes and no questions may also help you check if a person updates their knowledge frequently and really knows this stuff.

Here are a few yes and no questions about technical SEO to ask your potential hire.

Ask them to justify their answers to get even more insight:

  • Is structured data a Google ranking factor?
  • Do errors in the Coverage report in GSC always indicate an error on your website?
  • Can you use Google Search Console to analyze internal links on the website?
  • Can Google penalize you for duplicate content?
  • Is it possible for Google to treat a 302 redirect as 301?
  • Can you inform Google about the new domain for your website in a different way than through a 301 redirect?
  • Should you noindex category and tag pages?
  • Should a non-existent page always return 404?
  • Does Google always use the canonical URL you declared?
  • Does Google always respect the nofollow attribute on links?

Final Thoughts On Interviewing Technical SEOs

If your prospective technical SEO hire managed to get through all of these questions and gave you satisfactory answers,  congratulations!

Chances are good that you have a pretty smart and experienced technical SEO wanting to work for you.

On the other hand, even if the candidate wasn’t able to answer all of your questions currently but has a willingness to learn and genuine interest in SEO, they may still make a brilliant technical SEO expert in some time – if you give them a chance.

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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

Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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