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5 Restaurant SEO Tips Backed by Diners & Data

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5 Restaurant SEO Tips Backed by Diners & Data

The key to restaurant SEO is understanding that most people don’t search for specific restaurants. They search for the type of cuisine or dish they want to eat. This is especially true for younger folks, with 76% of 18-24 year olds searching this way.

Getting diners through the door, then, is a game of ranking well for these types of queries.

Here are a few ways to do this, backed by concrete research and the real experiences of food bloggers and serial diners.

Google Business Profile is a free tool to manage your restaurant’s appearance on Google. You can’t rank in Google Maps or the “local pack” search results without one.

Given how many people use Google to find restaurants, there’s virtually nothing more important than keeping this optimized and updated.

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If a listing contains few photos, no menu, or other scanty details, there is little chance that we might eat or order food from it.

Ranveer BrarRanveer Brar

If a restaurant or cafe is new, it should have pictures, detailed information, and a menu. Without these, I’m less inclined to give it a try.

Theo ChanTheo Chan

Here are a few of the most important things to focus on:

Add your menu

People don’t always search by cuisine. Sometimes, they search for a specific dish. You’ll likely stand a better chance of showing up for their search if the dish they searched for is on the menu uploaded to your Business Profile.

For example, if I search for “carbonara” in Google Maps, this nearby restaurant pops up because this dish is on its menu:

Google returns this restaurant in the search results because it has the dish I searched for on the menuGoogle returns this restaurant in the search results because it has the dish I searched for on the menu

Given that thousands of people across the US search for “carbonara near me” (and many other dishes “near me”) every month, this is an easy but often overlooked way to show up for more searches.

Lots of people search for dishes near them every month, as Ahrefs' data showsLots of people search for dishes near them every month, as Ahrefs' data shows

Plus, even when people don’t search this way, 85% of them still use menus to pick new restaurants.

Add photos of food and drink

People eat with their eyes first, which is probably why Google says to add at least three photos of the food and drink you serve.

There’s data to back up the importance of photos, too:

  • Businesses with photos receive 42% more requests for driving directions and 35% more website clicks. (Source)
  • Businesses with more than 100 photos get 520% more calls, 2,717% more direction requests, and 1,065% more website clicks (Source)

Add table reservations and/or online ordering

Having the option to book a table on your profile reduces friction and improves your chances of converting searchers to diners. There are plenty of third-party apps that can add this functionality, such as Resy, OpenTable, and Yelp.

For online ordering functionality, there are obvious options like Uber Eats and Doordash. However, given that 40% of consumers prefer to order directly from a restaurant’s website over third-party apps, it pays to offer a more direct option.

Owner is one solution here. Their platform gives your customers the ability to order food for collection or delivery via your own website and mobile app. I asked their VP of Marketing, David Fallarme, why this is so important:

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Your restaurant’s website should be your best sales channel. The best restaurants do this by making it easy for people to order directly from your website. When you do that, you’re satisfying searcher intent.

A painful mistake that restaurants make is having a great website, but then sending people to Uber Eats or DoorDash to make an order. Not only are you giving up commission fees on people who wanted to order directly, but you’re giving Google negative user experience signals. People come to your website, then close the tab because they don’t want to order from third parties, or they just bounce right off and complete a conversion on another website.

David FallermeDavid Fallerme

Reviews are believed to be the third most important ranking factor for “local pack” results. Their importance has also grown since 2013.

Review signals are believed to be getting more important over timeReview signals are believed to be getting more important over time

This is hardly surprising, given how many diners use reviews to help them decide where to eat.

Reviews are crucial in my decision-making process. I definitely lean towards restaurants with better or more reviews. Positive feedback from others gives me confidence in the quality of the food and service, which plays a big part in whether I’ll choose to dine there or order takeout.

Jessica RandhawaJessica Randhawa

While I may not read 20-30 reviews before I make a decision, I definitely would browse through the first few reviews to see what dishes are being recommended.

Merryl FernandesMerryl Fernandes

Where should you be trying to get them? Your Business Profile is the most crucial, with 43% of diners reading Google restaurant reviews. Yelp and TripAdvisor are also important, with 31% and 16% of diners reading reviews there.

Google is the #1 source of restaurant reviews for dinersGoogle is the #1 source of restaurant reviews for diners

Here are a couple of tips for getting more reviews:

Remind diners to leave a review after their meal

Here’s a genius way to do this I found on Reddit:

Genius tip on how to get more reviewsGenius tip on how to get more reviews

If that feels a little pushy for your tastes (it does for mine!), try placing cards on tables with a QR code link to review.

Cards with QR codes are an easy and cheap way to get more reviewsCards with QR codes are an easy and cheap way to get more reviews
Source

Here’s how to create one of these:

  1. Use Google’s instructions to find your Business Profile review link
  2. Search Google for a free QR code generator and paste in your link
  3. Print the code on cards

If you want to go the extra mile, you can also buy NFC-enabled cards or cards that diners can tap with their phones.

NFC cards are even better!NFC cards are even better!

Sidenote.

If you have the option for diners to book a table online, check your reservation app. Some let you email diners to ask for a review the day after their reservation.

For takeouts, you can print them on the receipt or just stamp them on your takeout boxes.

Ask diners to review you online

69% of consumers can recall leaving a business review after being prompted by the brand within the last year.

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Here are a few places you can do this:

  • Email. Place a short call to review (with a link) at the end of marketing emails.
  • Website. Link to your TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Google Profiles.
  • Social media. Create a post asking for reviews every now and again. People following you have probably dined with you and enjoyed your food before, so they’re unlikely to leave bad reviews.

Diners don’t always search by cuisine or dish. Sometimes, they search for restaurants near a popular attraction they’re visiting.

Recently, a search for “restaurants near The Alhambra” on Google Maps helped us to find recommended spots and choose where to dine.

Ranveer BrarRanveer Brar

I often search for restaurants by proximity, especially when I’m in an unfamiliar area or after attending an event.

Jessica RandhawaJessica Randhawa

I often search for restaurants nearby when I’m out and about or traveling. I spend every summer traveling with my family, and many of our days are impromptu, so we rely on Google Maps to find nearby restaurants. Ironically, this is how we ended up at a Cat Cafe in Quebec City this summer! 

Theo ChanTheo Chan

For example, Ahrefs tells us that there are an estimated 3,100 monthly searches for “restaurants near bryant park”:

Many people search for restaurants by proximity, as Ahrefs' data provesMany people search for restaurants by proximity, as Ahrefs' data proves

Most top-ranking pages for these kinds of searches will be listicles from sites like TripAdvisor, OpenTable, and other local guides. But, it is possible for restaurant websites to rank on the first page.

For example, this local pub ranks #5 for “pubs near wembley stadium”:

Websites can rank for proximity searchesWebsites can rank for proximity searches

Here’s how to optimize for these searches in three steps:

a) Find popular attractions nearby

Most restaurant owners will already know these. If that’s you, note them down and move on to the next step. If you’re doing SEO for a restaurant and have no idea what’s nearby, use this query to ask ChatGPT:

give me a list of 10 popular attractions near: [restaurant address]. don't give me any descriptions, just a comma-separated list of attraction names

It should give you something like this:

ChatGPT responseChatGPT response

b) Check their popularity

It only makes sense to optimize for attractions where people are searching for nearby restaurants. Here’s how to check which those are:

  1. Paste the list of attractions into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Go to the Matching terms report
  3. Add “restaurants near” to the Include filter.
  4. Look at which attractions get the most searches
Finding popular proximity keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords ExplorerFinding popular proximity keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

In this case, Nationwide Arena is the most popular, but people are also searching for restaurants near Easton Town Center and Franklin Park Zoo.

c) Optimize your website for them

This is really all about mentioning the attractions on your site in natural and helpful ways.

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Here are a few ways I’ve seen this done:

Testimonials

Moran’s Bar & Grille featured a Yelp review that mentions the arena and a few related terms on their homepage:

Featuring a review on your site is a natural way to add related keywords Featuring a review on your site is a natural way to add related keywords

This is likely what helped them to rank #9 for “restaurants near nationwide arena”:

This restaurant ranks on the first page for this proximity searchThis restaurant ranks on the first page for this proximity search

Booking advice

The White Horse Pub has advice for those booking to dine before a big game or concert on their homepage: 

Featuring booking advice is a nice way to add nearly location keywordsFeaturing booking advice is a nice way to add nearly location keywords

This is likely what helped them to rank #8 for “food near wembley stadium”:

This restaurant ranks on the first page for this proximity searchThis restaurant ranks on the first page for this proximity search

Location guide

Burger & Lobster created an entire page about restaurants in the area:

Creating an entire page about the nearby location is yet another way to optimize for nearby locationsCreating an entire page about the nearby location is yet another way to optimize for nearby locations

This is likely what helped them to rank #8 for “best restaurants by rockefeller center”:

This restaurant ranks on the first page for this proximity searchThis restaurant ranks on the first page for this proximity search

However, while this seemed to work, the execution is a little spammy for my tastes. Most of the copy is just fluff that ChatGPT could write.

This content isn't great...This content isn't great...

If you want to give this tactic a shot, I’d suggest creating a page with genuine local restaurant recommendations. Your joint can be one of them, but be helpful and feature some of the other places you love, too.

Our analysis of around 14 billion pages found a clear correlation between backlinks and keyword rankings.

Data: pages with more backlinks rank for more keywordsData: pages with more backlinks rank for more keywords

Backlinks can also help diners to discover your restaurant on other websites.

I discovered a coffee shop in Boston through a recommendation from a local blogger and have been multiple times since. Her description and photos really sold me on visiting, and it was a great find. I’ve visited a few of her recommendations.

Theo ChanTheo Chan

I was able to discover a nice little bistro through a food blogger’s site that gave a detailed review and had a link to the restaurant’s page. Because of this, I had one of the most memorable meals in my life.

Ranveer BrarRanveer Brar

I’ve discovered new restaurants from food bloggers’ Instagram accounts before, as well as from blog posts. For example, I learnt about a new Mexican place in Rome from the instagram page of Wanted in Rome.

Merryl FernandesMerryl Fernandes

Getting backlinks can be challenging, but here are a few tactics to get you started:

Get food bloggers to review you

Food bloggers who review you will usually link to you from their website.

Here’s a quick way to find bloggers to reach out to:

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  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool
  2. Switch the toggle to “referring domains”
  3. Enter your website in the “Not linking to this target” field
  4. Enter a few competitors’ websites in the “But linking to these competitors” fields
Use Ahrefs' Link Intersect report to find food bloggers to reach out toUse Ahrefs' Link Intersect report to find food bloggers to reach out to

Hit “Show link opportunities,” and it’ll show you websites linking to one or more of your competitors but not you.

The report is sorted by the number of link intersectsThe report is sorted by the number of link intersects

Eyeball the domains and food bloggers should jump out at you.

For example, three popular pizzerias in my city have links from a site that clearly belongs to a food blogger:

Example of an obvious food blogExample of an obvious food blog

Hit the caret in each competitor column and you’ll see the linking page:

Viewing the linking pagesViewing the linking pages

Each linking page in this case is a restaurant review, so it would definitely make sense to invite this blogger down for some grub in return for a review.

Reviews have benefits beyond SEO

Many food bloggers also have large followings on Instagram and TikTok, where they’ll likely also post their reviews.

For example, this blogger in my city has over 11,500 followers on Insta:

Many food bloggers have thousands of followers on social media, which is yet another non-SEO benefit to getting reviewedMany food bloggers have thousands of followers on social media, which is yet another non-SEO benefit to getting reviewed

Get “supplier” links

Every restaurant has suppliers, and those suppliers often have pages on their websites listing their “stockists.”

For example, this supplier of cured meats lists and links to all the restaurants they supply:

Example supplier page linking to nearby restaurantsExample supplier page linking to nearby restaurants

If your suppliers have a page like this, getting a link is usually as easy as reaching out and asking if they can add you.

To find these opportunities, just search Google for: [supplier name] partners|stockists

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How to find stockist pagesHow to find stockist pages

If you’re likely to have shared suppliers with competitors, you can also sometimes uncover these opportunities by searching their backlinks with Ahrefs:

  1. Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool
  2. Switch the toggle to “referring pages”
  3. Enter your website in the “Not linking to this target” field
  4. Enter a few competitors’ websites in the “But linking to these competitors” fields
  5. Hit “Show link opportunities”
Finding pages linking to competitors but not you in AhrefsFinding pages linking to competitors but not you in Ahrefs

If you then filter for referring pages with words like “stockists” or “partners” in their titles, you might see some opportunities:

Filtering for stockist/supplier pagesFiltering for stockist/supplier pages

Not finding any supplier pages?

If they have a blog, ask if they’d be interested in doing an interview or spotlight piece with one of their customers.

This is exactly what Adam Atkins, who runs a pizza food truck in the UK, did with one of his suppliers:

Example of an interview pieceExample of an interview piece

Most restaurant websites are a total mess.

For example, here’s the homepage for one of my favorite pizzerias:

This restaurant's website is a mess!This restaurant's website is a mess!

Everything is visually misaligned, there are buttons all over the place, and for some strange reason it’s asking me to buy a tshirt. (I don’t want a fashion show, I just want to see the menu!)

Other diners agree that a bad website leaves a bad taste in their mouths:

A bad website is a huge turn-off. For example, near where I live, I prefer ordering from Formosa Taipei over Mulan in Waltham/Lexington—even though Mulan might have slightly better food—because Formosa Taipei has a much easier ordering system. A cumbersome website can make the whole experience frustrating, so I’ll often choose convenience over slightly better quality if it means avoiding the hassle.

Theo ChanTheo Chan

An awful website can discourage eating out or ordering from certain eateries. Annoying PDF menus or complicated navigation are some examples of such issues that create a bad impression and might imply that the restaurant does not value its customers’ experience; hence, it will impact our decision whether to visit them or not.

Ranveer BrarRanveer Brar

Here are a few tips for improving your restaurant’s website for the 80% of searchers who care:

Put your menu on a page, not in a PDF

Google says more people search on mobile than desktop—and that’s across the board. For local searches like nearby restaurants, it’s probably the vast majority.

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This is why PDF menus are such a bad idea. They force potential diners to pinch, zoom, and pan their way around an ugly PDF when the same information could easily be put on a mobile-friendly page.

Nobody wants to view a PDF menu on mobileNobody wants to view a PDF menu on mobile

If you really must use a PDF, follow our SEO for PDFs guide to make sure it’s optimized. Google will still index it and it should appear in search results. But I have seen weird things happen with them…

For example, if I search for my favorite pizza restaurant’s menu on Google, this is the result:

Google ranks the wrong page when searching for this restaurant's menuGoogle ranks the wrong page when searching for this restaurant's menu

Here’s the page this takes me to:

Blank page that Google ranks. Nice one... not!Blank page that Google ranks. Nice one... not!

Despite Google having the PDF menu indexed, it chooses to send me to no man’s land—a blank page with a teeny tiny text link to the PDF menu.

If the menu was just on the page and not in an annoying PDF, this wouldn’t happen!

Make sure your site is free of technical issues

Technical issues can wreak havoc on a restaurant’s SEO.

For example, accidentally clicking the wrong button in some backend systems can deindex your entire site. The result is that your site won’t appear in Google search—at all.

Okay... so this isn't a real restaurant, but you get the idea!Okay... so this isn't a real restaurant, but you get the idea!

Not all technical SEO issues are this serious, of course, but it’s best to keep an eye on them and nip them in the bud as soon as possible.

To do this, sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account and schedule regular crawls in Site Audit. This checks your site for 170+ SEO issues and groups them by importance:

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SEO issues filtered by importance in Ahrefs' Site AuditSEO issues filtered by importance in Ahrefs' Site Audit

For example, the pizzeria I mentioned above has an orphan page (page with no internal links) getting organic traffic:

Example of an orphan page issueExample of an orphan page issue

Do you recognize the page? That’s right—it’s the dodgy blank menu page from earlier. This is exactly how I found that issue. To solve this, the site should either noindex this page or, ideally, put its menu there (instead of in the ugly PDF) and internally link to it.

If you’re not sure how to solve an issue that pops up for your site, click on the “?” icon to see advice on how to fix it:

How to find advice on fixing the issueHow to find advice on fixing the issue

If you’re not SEO-savvy enough to do the fixes yourself, export the affected pages and send them to your developer or a freelancer.

Final thoughts

It doesn’t matter how amazing your food is unless you can get customers through the door. That’s why SEO matters for restaurants. Your food may do the talking once the customer is dining with you, but it’s what they see online that’ll get them there.

Got questions? Ping me on LinkedIn or X.



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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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