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19 List Building Techniques For SaaS Link Building

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19 List Building Techniques For SaaS Link Building

A SaaS company’s link building techniques are similar to other business types.

Still, the list building methods are unique because of the type of content on publisher websites and the content resources a SaaS business possesses.

SaaS companies tend to have unique content resources, including engineering team insights, unique data, subject matter expert (SME) clients, competitor comparison pages, and a wide range of blog topics.

Using these resources, a company can secure brand mentions and links on sites that cover topics or content about:

  • Software alternatives or comparison articles.
  • SME listicles.
  • Internal SME quotes for content creators.
  • Statistical roundup articles to share SaaS clients or industry data.
  • SME guest posts.

List building is the process of matching these internal resources to external entities that will benefit from that resource and finding relevant prospects.

As I explain in my SEJ article, A Guide To Linkable Assets For Effective Link Building, linkable assets will be essential to most link building campaigns.

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If the site has no linkable content, then use this guide to start planning.

Although the techniques below can be used across other industries, they are currently highly effective in SaaS link building.

Now that you have content, start identifying prospective link lists using the following process.

Universal List Building Process

This process can be used for creating lists for many link building techniques. Use the following list building template with the process and methods below to start link building today.

However, choose the link research tool or technique that works best for your niche. Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic, or a search operator in Google can yield similar results.

Step 1: Seed A List Of Competitors And Keywords By Campaign Type

  • Select the type of list to build from the campaign options below, or competitor analysis. Add those to the proven link building models tab in the template (see screenshot below).
  • Create a seed list of keywords.
  • Identify direct or keyword competitors.
Image created by author, July 2023

Step 2: List Identification

Create a list: Select which of these three methods.

 Google Search Operator

Direct SEO Tool List

(Check out all the options here.)

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  • Semrush.
  • Ahrefs.
  • Moz.
  • Majestic.

Bulk List Building Tools

Search for lists.

Step 3: List Segmentation & Filtering

Narrow the list to blogs that link to the competitor using default and advanced filters.

Default Tool Filters

  • Filter by topical relevancy first.
  • Metrics filter: If the list has a lot of low-quality sites, then narrow the list based on the tools’ domain-level score (e.g., Domain Rating in Ahrefs or DA in Moz).

Content-Need Segmentation

Narrow the list by:

  • Content type: Each tool is a “content-type” filter to narrow the list to articles.
  • Placement: Select “content.”
  • Language: select your preferred language.
  • Advanced filter: Find in “text.”

Export

Manually Review & Segment Sites Based On

  • Topics or methods to secure links (e.g., pitch the new survey about cyber security).
  • Quality of content and site.

Add The Targeted Site List To The “List Tracker” Tab Of The Template

list building worksheet templateImage created by author, July 2023

Pro tip: Use a search operator in Pitchbox to narrow the list beyond the default campaign settings.

Use this process and the following techniques to create massive lists of prospective sites.

Competitor Backlink Lists

Competitor list building is centered around researching your competitors’ backlink profiles. You can quickly create a target list for your link building campaign by identifying the websites linking to your competitor’s content.

Writing an article about “software alternatives,” “best of,” or “top tools” is an easy way to create a valuable resource for readers. These topics are one reason why so many listicle articles exist.

These are great opportunities to generate links if they mention competitors’ brands but not yours.

1. Find Software Alternatives

{company name} intitle:alternative

For example, an SEO software like Semrush might search for:

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Ahrefs intitle:alternatives

2. To Find Lists Of Competitors, Use The Search Operators

{industry name + software} intitle:tools

{keyword} intitle:best of

{keyword} intitle:top

By modifying the search operator to focus on company blogs, the list can filter out major publications that may need to update their list.

{keyword} Inurl:blog intitle:best of

Although competitor link building typically yields some targeted links, a link profile should include diverse and high-authority placements. Passive source lists can provide that diversity.

Passive Content Creator Source Lists

Journalists and bloggers constantly search for sources, experts, and valuable content.

Become the source when they are searching.

HARO (Help A Reporter Out) was the only resource for a long time, but you can also use QwotedProfNet, and #journorequest (Twitter hashtag) to become a source.

After creating free or paid profiles for these sites, the request lists range from marketing case studies to business management or industry-specific requests.

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Look for other trends in the topics requests to determine other sources within the company.

For example, HARO has a lot of requests for AI or generative AI sources. These requests can be an opportunity to use an SME from the engineering, development, or product teams as a source.

Building these lists may seem simple, but it demands a strategic approach to maximize your chances of being picked as a source.

Here are three lists to build:

3. Marketing Team List

Set up the marketing team as sources. HARO lists general “business” topics like marketing-specific content and case studies.

4. Leadership Team List

Include your leadership team as sources. These individuals often have years of experience and unique perspectives that can provide depth to a content creator’s story.

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Plus, quotes from company leaders often hold more weight.

5. Industry Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)

These individuals within your organization or network have specialized knowledge in specific areas of your industry.

Content creators often seek experts who can provide in-depth insights on specific topics.

A SaaS company will have engineering or development team members that can be excellent sources of technical information.

However, content creators also search other areas for data or sources. As you’ll see below, content creators also go to Google and Reddit in their search.

List Building For Earned Links

Earning links doesn’t require building site lists for outreach, but rather lists of keywords or communities content creators are searching for information on a topic.

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Although these creators use many sources for research, they heavily use Google and Reddit to get direction, answer questions, or provide data.

Content creators are using research hubs on subreddits.

Keyword Research Lists

Instead of building a list of sites, this technique builds a list of targeted keywords for the content to rank.

6. Data Keywords

Create lists of keywords that indicate research-based queries. These often include terms like “statistics” or “data.”

By crafting content around these keywords, you stand a higher chance of earning backlinks from journalists or bloggers searching for data-driven insights in your industry.

Examples include:

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  • [industry] statistics [year].
  • [topic] data (e.g., Christmas shopping data).
  • [industry | keyword] trends.

7. Researching New Topics

Many writers create content about topics that are new to them. Thus they will search for very top-of-funnel terms like “what is” or “what are.”

8. Book Summary Search

Create a summary or outline of a book on a relevant topic.

Create a list of “[book] + summary” keywords. E.g., “product-led SEO book summary.”

9. Expert Search

Search for an expert with “top [topic] experts” for listicles. Get listed on those listicles.

10. Trendy Topics

Find keywords for trending topics, and become the expert. With new topics, SMEs will be limited.

Thus secure placements on roundup articles about experts in trending topics.

Tips:

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  • If your content is an order of magnitude (e.g., 10X better data quality) better than the top pieces, then build a list of referring domains that link to the top-ranking content. Use this as a primer list to do outreach and secure initial links.
  • Use the People Also Ask questions to identify topics to write about.

Subreddit lists

Content creators can use Reddit to learn more about their research, as subreddits exist for almost any category.

When creating these community lists, look for trends, not just one community. As you can see below, the “helpful sources” category has multiple similar subreddits.

Depending on the company’s niche, search for topical trends like “cyber security innovation threads.”

Here are three categories to build lists around, but research your niche.

11. General News

Create a list of general news subreddits that can provide a list for sharing quotes or unique data on a trending topic. Examples include /r/news and /r/worldnews.

12. Helpful Sources

Create a list of threads that posts data or helpful content around a topic. Some examples are /r/explainlikeimfive/, /r/dataisbeautiful, or /r/indepthstories.

13. Innovation Threads

In SaaS, if the product is innovative or leadership has a value-add take on a trending topic, Reddit has threads. For example, /r/Futurology has content on AI or advanced technology topics.

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Building lists are easy to write about but difficult to execute. Use the following tips to search and filter down the entire list.

Tips to filter Reddit interactions for a targeted site list.

  • Subreddit Research: Use the Reddit search feature to find subreddits related to your industry or niche. Each subreddit is a community with its own rules and preferences. Understand these before you post.
  • Look for query-based threads: Search for threads where users ask questions or seek information about your industry or niche. These results yield great opportunities to provide a helpful response and include a relevant link to your content.
  • Host an AMA (Ask Me Anything) session: If you’re an expert in a particular field, you can host an AMA session. This focus allows you to share a lot of links to your content. Ensure your AMA provides value and isn’t just self-promotion.
  • Join discussions: Engage in discussions in your targeted subreddits. You can share if your content is relevant and provides more insight or a different perspective.
  • Share unique, high-quality content: Reddit users appreciate unique, high-quality content. If your content meets this standard, you’re more likely to earn upvotes, comments, and potentially backlinks.

Earning links can be time-consuming and resource intensive, but the next section covers a technique that any marketer can execute: guest posting.

High-Authority Guest Posting Lists

A “high authority guest post” refers to a blog or article written by a guest author and posted on a highly reputable, authoritative website.

The credibility and recognition of the host website are expected to increase the reach, credibility, and impact of the guest post. An executive, manager, or company leader will find more opportunities for the highest authority contributions.

These team members can secure contributions to major publications or company blogs. A strong thought leader can contribute to sites like Harvard Business Review or Fast Company.

However, guest posts on relevant company blogs are available in higher volume.

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14. Major Publications Contributions

To build a list of major publications that will provide a byline, search for lists in Google with search operators.

A final list of these publications will be short, as many sites publish lists of them with the contributor guidelines.

To find these lists, search in Google with the following search operator, and

{keyword} -guidelines intitle:"contributor" intext:"publication"

15. Niche Company Blogs

Some websites also allow for a guest article contribution. For example, HubSpot allows experts to create and publish on the blog.

To find these blogs, search in Google for a variation of the search operators:

{keyword} intitle:"contributor"

Although this operator uses “contributor,” swap that word out for various terms to expand the list:

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  • Guest post.
  • Guest contributor.
  • Write for us.
  • Blogging guidelines.
  • Contributor guidelines.
  • Submit a post.

Skyscraper Technique List Building

The Skyscraper Technique is a link building technique where you find existing high-performing content on a topic related to your industry, create something even better, and then reach out to the right people so they can link to your superior content.

It was developed by Brian Dean from Backlinko, and it’s a highly effective method of acquiring high-quality backlinks.

16. Links To Original Content

This list building method is similar to competitor analysis. Use Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, or Majestic’s backlink reports to identify links directly pointing to the URL of the topic content.

However, this process is manual, as you have to check each domain’s links individually. Using Pitchbox can make this process more scalable with the “URL backlinks” integration campaign.

17. Site & Authors That Have Covered The Topic

Use a simple Google search to find articles or blog posts about your chosen topic.

Look for articles ranking on the first few pages of Google, as these are likely high-authority sites.

You can also use Google’s ‘site:’ operator to search specific websites for relevant content.

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Pro tip: Exclude the keyword from the title to find content that mentions the topic but doesn’t cover it deeply in a whole article:

 -intitle:{keyword} intext:{keyword}

The Skyscraper has become very popular in the SaaS space, as have link exchanges.

Link Exchange Lists

Link exchanges refer to the process where two websites agree to link to each other to improve search engine visibility. However, think of these as resource exchanges instead of link exchanges.

In a resource exchange, each website shares informational content with each other’s audience. These assets include blog posts, studies, or guides.

18. Identify Companies For Link Exchanges

Not all, but many companies use a /blog or /resource folder structure. This common denominator can reduce the time to build a list, as these variables can be used to design search operators.

However, some company blogs exclude the /blog from the article’s URL. Thus the blog will be example.com/example-article instead of /blog/example-article.

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For the latter, use the search operator

 inurl:"blog" intitle:{keyword}

19. Non-competing Article Exchanges

Find link exchange opportunities from articles that cover the topic but are not trying to rank for the exact keywords. Filter these out by excluding them.

inurl:"blog" intext:{keyword} -intitle:{keyword}

Conclusion

Link building for SaaS companies requires leveraging unique content resources and implementing strategic techniques.

Among these, the utilization of competitor backlink lists, passive content creator source lists, earned links, high-authority guest posting, and the Skyscraper Technique are significantly effective.

With meticulous attention to creating valuable content and a dedicated focus on list-building processes, SaaS companies can significantly improve their link-building efforts.

Understanding the link building landscape is not merely a desirable skill but an essential aspect of SaaS marketing.

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Future efforts should focus on continually refining these strategies in response to evolving industry trends and market needs.

More resources: 


Featured Image: Sammby/Shutterstock



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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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