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5 Amazing Landing Page Examples To Inspire Your Own

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5 Amazing Landing Page Examples To Inspire Your Own

Landing pages – they’re powerful, aren’t they?

When we click on an ad, it’s the landing page that helps us decide what to do next.

Ideally, it makes you do a double-take and proclaim, “I must have this!”

It can also fall flat and go viral for all the wrong reasons. (I’m looking at you Rainbow capitalism.)

The design of a good landing page is an intersection of art, marketing, and psychology.

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And, if you’re reading this article, that means you’re looking for guidance and inspiration to improve your own landing pages.

That’s exactly what we’re going to do.

We are going to share the features of what makes an amazing landing page and break down five examples to learn from.

Features Of An Amazing Landing Page

The hard truth: Getting people to opt in is tricky.

Even when the tech is amazing and the product is innovative.

If you send visitors to a webpage that fails to communicate the value, all of your market research and product development efforts go right down the drain.

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The good news is this article is all about helping you create amazing landing pages that encourage more conversions – and, ultimately, generate more customers.

Improve your success rate by weaving these six features into your landing page design.

Poppin’

Landing pages should be distraction-free in order to focus on the task at hand – getting the visitor to convert.

This means that top navigation can be ditched in favor of a sleek, one-page design. Just be sure to leave a clickable logo in case users want a way out but still want to interact with your brand.

Revealing the product with clear annotated product visuals, helps visitors picture themselves using it.

Most importantly, the page has to pop! An eye-catching hero image and visuals help to capture the visitor’s attention and convey what the offer is in a way our brains can process quicker.

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Free Of Fluff

The copy on a landing page is one of the most important elements. It’s what convinces website visitors to convert.

Great landing page copy uses strong headlines, clear value propositions, and explains “why” they matter.

Content should focus on user benefits over product features and address any doubts so visitors don’t leave.

The copy should be focused and free of fluff; every word should serve a purpose.

FOMO

FOMO is real. One of the most powerful persuasion techniques that landing pages can use is social proof.

If we see that others (we respect) are doing it, we are more likely to do it, too. This is the business equivalent of your mom asking you, “If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?”

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…Yes, yes I would.

You can create FOMO by featuring testimonials from happy (relatable) customers or including statistics about how many people are using and loving the service or product.

Ready, Set, Go

A landing page shouldn’t feel like trying to break out of an escape room.

You need a strong call-to-action (CTA) if you want the visitor to convert.

A strong CTA is clear, concise, and explains why it’s important for the visitor to take this action.

A clear and concise call-to-action is just one action and the button contrasts with the page – this is so users can’t miss it.

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Need For Speed

Page speed is how quickly a webpage loads. Basically, make sure it loads fast so people don’t leave. That’s it.

5 Examples Of Landing Pages

An amazing landing page is one that helps website visitors feel that this is the right company (or the right product) for the job.

And, there’s no better way to learn about what makes an amazing landing page than by exploring real-world examples from some of the best landing pages on the web.

Here are five examples of amazing landing pages.

1. ASOS

British online retailer ASOS is among the world’s most valuable apparel brands, competing with Nike, Adidas, and Zara.

This means there must be something really special behind those marketing strategies that online retailers can learn from.

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Let’s see what they’re doing right.

I searched for [wedding guest plus size dresses] and saw a search network ad from ASOS which took me to a landing page for women’s plus size dresses for U.S. web visitors.

Screenshot from ASOS, June 2022.

For starters, the ad took me directly to a landing page related to my search query – I love when that happens.

The full-length thumbnails of plus size models, moving in the dresses, helps me immediately know that I’m in the right place and I can begin to imagine myself in the product.

Top navigation breadcrumbs let me know exactly where I am on the site, so if I want to go back and see all the curve clothing, that’s really simple to do.

Filters are front and center for me to further refine my search by how new it is, eco-responsibility, color, price, and more.

Sales copy is free of fluff allowing the user to focus on the product (clothes). Description of the category page does include reference to which brands to check out for trending styles.

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All in all, it’s a clean, well-organized landing page that keeps attention directly on the product.

ASOS may want to test adding social proof to their landing page by adding a filter based on user reviews or engage FOMO by highlighting that an item is selling fast.

2. DRIFT

B2B commerce startup Drift is a conversational marketing and sales technology company, well known for its live chatbot.

It is one of the only Latino-founded companies to ever achieve a valuation over $1 billion.

“Our purpose as a company remains simple and consistent: Build a platform that makes it simpler for customers to buy from you,” Drift CEO David Cancel said in a statement.

Let’s see how simple Drift makes their product to buy and check out their live-chat landing page.

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B2B SaaS landing page exampleScreenshot from DRIFT, June 2022.

Ok, I am geeking out over the bright and minimalistic design (slight 90s vibes); it looks so sharp on all devices.

Above the fold, we see a big, bold headline immediately addressing how the app helps business owners “engage and convert” with Drift’s solution “live chat.”

Below the headline, the content block explains why users are not engaging or converting: “Today’s buyer doesn’t want to wait.”

Nice contrasting color on the CTA inviting web visitors to “Get a Demo.”

The header image uses the product as the example which is 10x better than a stock photo.

And, I have to call out the shield icon in the bottom left-hand corner that opens privacy settings. This small addition provides site visitors with a subconscious affirmation that the company takes data privacy seriously.

As we scroll down the page, we see social proof with a video review by the senior director of a global marketing operations and technology company.

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Video testimonial on landing page exampleScreenshot from DRIFT, June 2022.

If you can get video reviews, do it! They are way more engaging than a standard text review because they’re really hard to fake.

Continuing to scroll down the page, the content teeter-totters between sharing different use cases with a summary and image or .gif and social proof in the form of a text quote or case study.

At the end of the long-form landing page, there is a solid call to action “start conversations with your website visitors now.” With a contrasting button, “Get a Demo.”

Bottom of page CTA landing page exampleScreenshot from DRIFT, June 2022.

When you click on “Get a Demo” it launches the product itself and you interact with the Drift bot to book a demo.

Drift’s live chat page checks off all the features of an amazing landing page, making it extremely easy to buy from them.

3. LawnDoctor.com

Lawn Doctor offers lawn maintenance and pest control services, but it’s not your run-of-the-mill landscaping company.

This lawn care brand has grown to more than 630 locations, increasing its year-over-year sales by 16% in 2020.

Local service providers can learn a lot from Lawn Doctor’s landing page. Let’s take a look at how they’ve designed their landing page to attract new customers.

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local service provider landing page exampleScreenshot from Lawn Doctor, June 2022.

Lawn Doctor is such a great example for local service companies.

The color palette uses the rich color of green consumers wants to attain with a hero image featuring what the site visitor wants, a beautifully landscaped backyard.

Social proof is visualized with the 4.7 star average Google rating overlay on the image. The exact number of 4.7 is helpful because it feels like a real number and not an approximation.

The estimate form is available at the top; users don’t have to go scrolling for it, and a phone number is available in the top right corner for those that don’t want to wait.

When I enter my zip code into the form, the city and state are automatically populated for me which is awesome because I get lazy and don’t want to enter every detail.

Sales copy gets right to the point; the header explains you’re getting customized lawn care with a scientific approach.

The word choice “custom” and “scientific” makes me think that I’m getting a better service than I would from anyone else.

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Below the header image but above the fold, Lawn Doctor upsells me services that are highly relevant to the current season.

I can click on that CTA to learn more or I’m more likely to ask about it when a sales representative calls me.

Just in case a user had any hesitation, there is a 100% refund if I’m not fully satisfied, followed by Google reviews for social proof.

The only thing this page is missing is the fear of missing out which Lawn Doctor could do with a countdown discount timer.

4. Flywheel

Flywheel was acquired by WordPress in 2019.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed but in an interview, Heather Brunner confirmed Flywheel’s annual recurring revenue was $18 million at the time of acquisition.

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What made Flywheel so successful? Aside from being a great managed WordPress hosting platform, the company’s marketing was dialed in. Take a look!

eBook landing page exampleScreenshot from Flywheel, June 2022.

Top navigation is not present, helping the page visitor to stay focused on the content you want them to.

The logo reminds site visitors where they are and is clickable providing an easy escape back to the main domain.

The beautiful color scheme with the calm business blue and contrasting money green call-to-action button above the fold.

The headline includes the word “free” letting visitors know they won’t have to pay for the download.

Text is broken up into chunks making it easy to read on mobile.

ebook landing page example_show the productScreenshot from Flywheel, June 2022.

Below the fold is a mini-preview of the chapters so I know what I’m exchanging my personal information for. Gives me a sense of whether or not it’s worth it to me.

The final CTA at the bottom of the landing page reinforces that the ebook is completely free and filled with secrets! The download is a quick and simple company email.

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ebook landing page example_bottom of the page ctaScreenshot from Flywheel, June 2022.

Form completion confirmation takes me to the product home page to further explore the product. All in all a beautiful ebook landing page that lead gen companies can learn from.

The only suggestion here is to add social proof near the bottom CTA to “seal the deal.”

5. Breathwrk

Breathwrk is a female-founded startup that raised an undisclosed amount from a total of 10 investors including Demo Lovato and BAM Ventures.

The breathing exercises app has over 1.2 million users worldwide.

Let’s see if the landing page can reduce our stress and improve landing page design?

The search query for this landing page was, “how to handle stress at work.”

App landing page exampleScreenshot from Breathwrk, June 2022.

The main Navigation is simplified, which keeps the users focused on the information you want them to look at.

But if they click the “More” button a drop-down list of additional pages (Science, FAQ, Blog, and more) is available.

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The color palette is calming tones of blue and green with a contrasting CTA button “contact us” in purple.

Just like Drift, Breathwrk shows the product which allows site visitors to see what they’re going to get.

The headline starts with the main idea, “Improve your workplace,” and the subheading tells us how to “help your employees reduce stress and improve focus…”

Followed by the FOMO by showcasing the companies who are using the Breathwrk app for their employees.

As we scroll down the landing page, Breathwrk does a brilliant job explaining the app’s features from the perspective of the user.

App landing page example_explaining features as user benefitScreenshot from Breathwrk, June 2022.

A user doesn’t really care that there’s an option for breathing exercises before meetings but a user is interested in reducing employee stress and improving focus between back-to-back meetings, and before a big pitch.

The sales copy minimizes objections by explaining that the app is easy to set up and easy to manage.

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App landing page example_reduce objectionsScreenshot from Breathwrk, June 2022.

This is important because the last thing an organization needs is stress setting up an app to reduce stress.

Easy onboarding, ongoing support, and user analytics (so you can see if employees are using the app and how they’re using the app).

Breathwrk provides social proof in the form of text review quotes right before the CTA “Get Breathwrk for your team” and form fill.

App landing page example_social proofScreenshot from Breathwrk, June 2022.

An amazing example of an App landing page. It grabs attention, shows the product, and explains how it creates value for the site visitor.

Final Thoughts

Overall, an amazing landing page helps site visitors decide what to do next.

Some features to consider when designing a landing page is:

  • The design captures visitors’ attention and keeps it on the end goal.
  • Copy is focused and free of fluff.
  • Use social proof and FOMO.
  • Minimize objections and have a clear CTA.
  • Make sure it loads fast.

And, don’t forget to set up Analytics to measure and learn from user activity. Testing is going to be your secret to success.

More Resources:


Featured Image: Mila Supinskaya Glashchenko/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

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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