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5 Types of Blogs That Make Money

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5 Types of Blogs That Make Money

Looking for the best type of blog to make money? Let’s look at some data first:
  • About 15% of bloggers make a full-time income from blogging ($30K a year). 
  • About 31% of bloggers make a decent side income from blogging ($6K a year).
  • 6%–10% of bloggers make over $10K a month. 
  • You can realistically make $25K–$50K in your first year of blogging. 
  • The most successful blogs make over $100K a month.

Looks like professional blogging may actually be a good idea. You can make a full-time income or a decent side income. You can even own several blogs, hire copywriters, and multiply your earnings. 

But like in every other business, nobody can guarantee your blogging business will work out. It usually takes years to be financially independent through blogging. Your first step is deciding on the type of blog you want to run. 

With that said, here are the five types proven to make money. 

Probably the most popular type of blog created with the purpose of making money. This kind of blog will take a deep dive into a particular niche or theme to cover as many topics as possible (to maximize traffic) or just the ones that are fit for the blog’s angle. 

Topics are usually picked by the criteria of:

  • Traffic potential (mostly organic traffic from search engines).
  • The ability to monetize traffic (for instance, some topics will earn only from ads while others will also be a good fit for product placement).
  • Popular requests from readers. 
  • Trends.  

Here are some profitable blog niches with a list of typical content and blog examples: 

Niche Typical content Blog example Last monthly income report Pageviews (from last income report)
Food and cooking Recipes categorized by type of meal and diet, cookware reviews, tips and tricks, listicles Pinch of Yum $95,196 (source) 4.245M
Health and wellness Food, relationships, fitness, beauty, psychology Hot Beauty Health $9,655 (source) 208.6K
Parenting Pregnancy, child raising advice, product reviews, food recipes, stay-at-home parent jobs, kid activities, household tips The Soccer Mom Blog  $11,288 (source) 500K
News Anything newsworthy in one niche or multiple niches (also gossip) HuffPost Acquired by AOL in 2011 for $315M, then acquired by BuzzFeed (source). According to this source, it generates $14M/mo. 5.8M (monthly organic traffic March 2023, via Ahrefs)
Tech Software and hardware reviews, exclusive deals, how to use software tools, comparisons, listicles, making money online, tech news, buying guides, gaming 99signals $5,242 (source) 18K (monthly organic traffic on the date of the report, via Ahrefs)
Personal development Life hacks, financial freedom, wellness, psychology, motivation, spirituality, fitness Let’s Reach Success $6,652 (source) 115.5K
Pets Pet health, product reviews, activities for pets, traveling with pets, pet adoption, training, tips, listicles You Did What With Your Weiner $7,720 (includes income outside of the content, source) 40K (monthly organic traffic on the date of the report, via Ahrefs)
Entrepreneurship Making money online, starting a business, interviews, complete courses, how-tos, inspiration Smart Passive Income $166,559 (source) 68K (monthly organic traffic on the date of the report, all blogs, via Ahrefs)
Finance Investing, saving money, retirement, financial product reviews, buying guides, family finance, mortgages, gig economy, debt, career advice, entrepreneurship, financial freedom Millennial Money $33,473 on average (source) 1.5M visits in 2017
Fashion Outfit ideas, home decor, beauty, style tips, gift ideas, listicles, buyer guides Chic Pursuit $11,376 (source) 135.3K
Lifestyle Anything related to solving life’s problems and living a happier life Abby Organizes $41.7K (source) Over 400K
Travel City guides, listicles, traveling tips, gear and location reviews, life on the road, digital nomadism Local Adventurer $41K (source) 541.8K
DIY/crafts DIY decorations, DIY weekend projects, handcraft tutorials, life hacks, product reviews, food recipes, DIY repairs, renovations Jennifer Maker $15,158 (source) 125.4K

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If you’re serious about blogging, take some time to read through the income reports linked above. At least a few of them. You’ll find some unique and inspiring stories and often great business tips.

The above list most probably doesn’t show all possible lucrative niches. But here’s a quick tip to check if a niche is profitable: search for affiliate programs in that niche. 

Look for affiliate programs in a niche to see if it's potentially profitable

Type 2. Affiliate/review blogs 

While practically every niche blog will review products to earn commissions, there are blogs that focus only on that (and turn it into art). 

But why reviews? There are two reasons.

Number #1 is the demand. People turn to in-depth reviews made by people with first-hand experience to help them make a choice. Especially if the product is expensive or there are a lot of alternatives. 

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For instance, a single page on the best headphones for 2023 can generate over 12K in organic visits each month, ranking for hundreds of keywords related to headphone reviews. You can get a sense of the demand for this kind of service when you look at the search volume of some keywords in the U.S. alone:

Search volume of keywords
Data via Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer.

In fact, the entire #1 page on Google for “headphones” shows commercial search intent with reviews showing up as well. 

SERP overview for "headphones"

Secondly, affiliate programs are typically a substantial part of a blogger’s earnings. For example, the Smart Passive Income blog generated approximately 63.4% (over $100K) of its income from affiliate deals. 

SPI's income report

Some blogs review all kinds of products that offer commission, while others focus on a particular niche such as tech gadgets or parenting products. As long as there’s an affiliate program for the product or the merchant (seller) can offer you a deal, any product niche can be profitable. 

If you’re curious about the ingredients of success for this type of blog, check out our case studies: 

Tip

Getting free traffic from Google to your reviews is definitely possible, but it’s not easy. For Google, pages with product reviews are of special interest, so make sure you’re following Google’s guidelines.

Starting a personal blog is probably the easiest thing. You can write just about anything—it’s your blog. But a personal blog designed to make money is something a bit different. 

Of course, it has that unique, personal tone. It’s written from a personal point of view, but it does need to have a strategy to monetize “something.”

That something can be:

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Or it can be something no one has ever done before. I mean, before I discovered Gala Darling’s blog, I wouldn’t dare to think you could monetize EFT tapping sessions (a real thing, look it up). 

In terms of topics and content formats, there are no rules for personal topics. They can talk about everything and anything. What’s typical for these blogs, though, is that they offer some kind of content upgrade or a product, such as a book or a course. 

A blog selling author's books

Type 4. Personal brand blogs

Personal brand blogs are blogs with the sole purpose of making one’s name in the business. What sets them apart from personal blogs is that their content is a lot more focused on the industry the brand is set in. 

Here are some typical content formats you will find on such blogs: 

  • How-to guides
  • Tutorials and courses 
  • Definition posts
  • Original research 
  • Feature release notes
  • Opinion pieces 
  • Case studies 
  • Listicles 
  • Product reviews 
  • Podcasts
  • Videos 
  • Products and/or services
  • Free resources: tools, cheat sheets, checklists, templates, etc

An example of such a blog is Charli Marie. It’s run by a designer whose personal mission is “to help anyone else who falls in love with design to succeed in their careers.” Charli uses various educational content (articles, videos, podcasts) to cater to an audience of over 250K people.

As you can imagine, that kind of audience helps Charli grow her brand in the design business. But on top of that, she monetizes her recognition by offering paid speaking engagements, mentoring, site audits, and an original hand-made font. 

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Personal brand blog selling services and products

Type 5. Business/corporate blogs 

The purpose of business and corporate blogs is to promote products, services, and brands owned by the business. 

This is usually achieved by creating educational content around the product or service in order to attract and retain customers. Typical content formats you will find on such blogs include these: 

  • How-to guides
  • Definition posts
  • Original research 
  • Interviews 
  • Feature release notes
  • Opinion pieces 
  • Case studies 
  • Listicles 
  • Company news 
  • Free resources: cheat sheets, checklists, templates, etc

The blog you’re reading right now is an example of this type. By regularly publishing and updating SEO content, we generate an estimated 641K visits from search engines each month. We’d need to spend about $838K each month to get similar traffic from ads. 

Organic traffic to the Ahrefs Blog

Blogs owned by big corporations tend to be less about acquiring customers and more about providing an outlet for the company to communicate with the audience. For instance, Apple calls its blog the Newsroom. The type of stuff it writes about is releasing a new iPhone color or a story about how the company supports sustainable farming. 

By the way, a corporate blog like that can be a good idea for catching branded keywords that are hard to cover anywhere else. 

Branded keywords

How to find proven blog post topics

Writing what you want and how you want can be very satisfying. It’s one of the best things about having a blog. But if you want your blog to make money, a good portion of your content should be based on existing demand for information, products, and services. 

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One of the best ways to gauge that demand is to learn what people search for online. And the best part about it is that once you rank for relevant search queries, you can get a free, passive, and compounding source of traffic. 

Here are three basic methods. They can give you topic ideas even if you’re not an expert in the topic or niche.

1. Do keyword research

Keyword research is the process of discovering valuable search queries that your target customers type into search engines like Google to look for products, services, and information. 

There are many techniques to do keyword research, so I’ll link to some at the end of this section. The basic process goes like this:

  1. Get a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter seed keywords related to your niche, e.g., seo, digital marketing, online marketing, online business
  3. Use filters to refine the results and find the best keywords for your website 
Basic keyword research

How do you know which keywords will be the best for your website?

  • Your keywords should have traffic potential.
  • You can match the search intent behind your keywords.
  • Your keywords can bring valuable traffic (i.e., traffic you can monetize). 
  • You can rank for those keywords.

For instance, you can look for low-competition keywords that could get your blog ranking relatively fast. For this, you can use the Keyword Difficulty filter (KD), Lowest DR filter, and Traffic Potential minimum of 100. In this case, you’ll get nearly 3K potential keyword ideas.

Looking for low-competition keywords

2. Analyze other blogs in the niche 

Having organic competitors has its good sides. You can get keyword ideas from someone else’s website.

In Ahrefs, there are two handy tools you can use for that. 

The first is Site Explorer. You can paste any URL and discover organic (and paid) keywords that the URL is ranking for. 

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Organic keywords report in Ahrefs

The second is our Content Gap tool. It shows you keywords that your competitors rank for, but you don’t. It’s a shortcut to discovering good keyword ideas that you haven’t targeted already. 

Content Gap tool in Ahrefs

3. Discover high-performing content in your niche 

You can also come up with good topics by researching already existing content instead of keywords. You can do that using Content Explorer

The first technique is to look for pages that get high organic traffic without many backlinks (a key ranking factor, but they’re hard to get). 

  1. Enter a topic and set the mode to “In title”
  2. Set the filters: Referring domains up to 10, Page traffic min. 500, and set the language you want the results in 
High organic traffic without many backlinks—research in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

The second technique is to look for content ideas that generate links. They won’t necessarily bring you a lot of traffic, but the links they can generate can boost your overall SEO. 

  1. Enter a topic and set the mode to “In title” 
  2. Set filters: Referring domains from 200, the language of the page 
Content that gets links—research in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

If you’re looking for content that did well on Twitter and Pinterest, there are filters for that too. 

You can opt to show only pages with a minimum share number or sort the results by shares.

Filtering results by social shares in Ahrefs' Content Explorer
Sorting results by social shares in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

How to monetize a blog 

So how is money made in the blogging industry, actually? There are at least nine ways, and you can use most of them simultaneously. 

1. Advertising

Advertising monetizes your traffic directly in the simplest way possible. The more traffic, the more you earn. 

On average, bloggers make $0.1 to $0.5 per pageview from ad networks (source). 

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You can sign up with an ad network like Google AdSense directly or use an ad management platform (which seems to be the common solution). Some of the popular ad management platforms are AdThrive, Mediavine, and Ezoic.  

To illustrate, Pinch of Yum generated around 55% ($52,313.13) of its income from ads in November 2017. You can’t miss the ads on the website. 

Advertising on blog example

2. Affiliate programs 

Affiliate programs allow bloggers to earn a commission whenever their visitors buy a product after clicking on an affiliate link. It’s earning money by recommending things. 

With ads, you get paid based on the number of people that visited the page with the ad. But the bar is higher with affiliate programs—your content has to entice somebody to make a purchase decision. But you can potentially earn more through affiliates. 

Plus, this method doesn’t clutter your blog with ads. Of course, you can use both methods. 

Here’s an example. We visit Jennifer Maker where we see a guide on how to make a heart-shaped explosion box. Everything looks great, so we want to make that decoration. Here’s a shopping list with links to Amazon. 

Affiliate links example

Each one has an affiliate program tag. So if we buy, Jennifer earns a percentage of that (which she discloses on her blog). Everyone’s happy. 

Jennifer earned only 1.73% ($261.91) from affiliate programs in her last income report. But as we’ve seen earlier with the Smart Passive Income blog, affiliate programs can earn you a hefty sum and become the pillar of your income. 

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There are quite a few affiliate programs out there. Some pay as little as 3%, some 50%, and you can get up to 90% commission on rare occasions. A few popular affiliate platforms are Amazon Affiliate Program, ShareASale, and ClickBank

Tip

Most of the time you will be able to spot sponsored links (affiliate and others) through the “sponsored” and “nofollow” link attributes. By using a tool like Ahrefs, you can get a list of those links on any website and see if you can use the same affiliate program or get a similar deal.
How to find sponsored links on any site

3. Sponsored content 

In this monetization method, you create one or a series of content pieces (articles, social media posts, newsletters, etc.) dedicated to promoting a single brand. It usually comes in the form of a product review, guide on using the product, or product placement. 

Sponsored article example

It’s a deal based on participation. The visitor doesn’t need to buy the product, and you get rewarded per published content (and not views like with ads). 

For example, Hot Beauty Health reported earning 39.37% ($3.8K) of her monthly income by doing six sponsored post campaigns (articles + social media). 

Furthermore, she didn’t even need to reach out to the sponsors. They reached her through brand networks she signed up for. 

Indeed, there are services where content creators can sign up and wait for the sponsored post opportunity to come or choose a partnership they qualify for and negotiate a deal. A few examples are IZEA, Impact Radius, or Captiv8

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Of the monetization methods covered so far, this is the most “exclusive” one. How much you earn depends on your reputation in a particular niche, the quality of your content, and the size of your regular audience. 

Once you get Pinch-of-Yum-famous (or even slightly less famous), you practically become an online magazine and can act like one: 

Pinch of Yum has its own "work with us" page
Pinch of Yum has its own “work with us” page.
Case studies on the Pinch of Yum blog
It even posts case studies, a professional move.

4. Selling products 

Your blog can be an e-commerce platform too. You can use it to sell others’ products or even your own products. 

Well, “e-commerce” may be an overstatement here. Most bloggers don’t actually store products or even do dropshipping. They just make it look like a shop. 

For example, at Love & Lemons Shop, all the links lead to Amazon. The first three products are original; the rest are third-party products with affiliate links. 

Affiliate shop on Love & Lemons' blog

Here’s another example. The Financial Samurai used the blog to create and promote his best-selling book “Buy This Not That.” 

Financial Samurai used his blog to create and promote his book

Here’s an interesting example from Smart Passive Income. What is essentially a directory of affiliate links feels like the best shopping experience for tools for online entrepreneurs. All thanks to SPIs’ original content and reputation. 

Recommended tools with affiliate links

Can blogs sell their own physical products through their own stores? Sure, mindbodygreen supplements are a good example.

Blog selling its own physical products through a proprietary store

5. Online courses 

A very popular option among bloggers. 

Interestingly enough, one of the most popular types of courses I’ve seen so far is online entrepreneurship courses, such as making money by blogging. 

Online courses, like any other original products, are in the sky-is-the-limit category when it comes to income. To illustrate, Melyssa Griffin earned “only” $25,572 from affiliate programs while a staggering $258,108 from an online course. In one month. 

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Income report from a blogger

All you need to create an online course is your original content. There are affordable tools that will cover the tech side and payments for you, such as Teachable, Thinkific, Kajabi.

6. Subscription-based membership

With this method, you’re offering access to special content or a community gathered around the blog on a recurring payment plan. 

To illustrate such a business model, let’s go back to Gala Darling. On the blog, Gala shares her life philosophy and teaches personal development techniques, self-love, and empowerment. 

She also offers two subscription packages priced at $44/mo and $99/mo. Subscribers get access to exclusive content and a community for group EFT tapping (an actual self-healing method, despite the appearance). 

Subscription-based membership

There is an entire blogging platform based on this monetization method: Substack. This is one of your options for monetizing a blog too. 

The benefits of using Substack are it is a turnkey publishing platform with built-in payments and support; you can also get subscribers within the Substack network. However, you won’t be able to run ads or add affiliate links. 

Monetization with Substack examples

Just like with ecourses, the tools for paid communities are already there. Try Patreon, Memberstack, Slack, or even Facebook. 

7. Events and speaking 

Some people who run personal or personal brand blogs offer others the ability to hire them for events and speaking.

But this is a monetization method with a high entry barrier. You need to be a recognizable figure in your niche. But once you’re there… 

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… you could be like Tom Bilyeu of Impact Theory and earn up to $100K in speaking fees (source).

A blogger's speaking fees

8. Coaching and mentoring 

Unlike public speaking, you don’t need to be famous to offer paid coaching. You just have to be really good at what you do—and your blog can prove it. 

Actually, your blog can prove that you’re good at blogging, and that is the value you can monetize. That’s exactly what Practical Wanderlust does: 

Example of coaching being monetized

Coaching and mentoring can be the perfect monetization option if your blog is about solving professional challenges: marketing, web design, management, SEO, and so on.

9. Selling the blog 

Last but not least, you can make money by selling the blogs you own. 

Selling the blog can be your goal from day one. Or if after some time you decide that blogging is not for you, you don’t need to bury everything. Someone may be interested in buying the blog, even if it’s for the domain and links that you earned. 

To illustrate: On Flippa, at the time of writing, there are 1,134 blogs for sale selling for as high as $4.7M.

Number of blogs for sale on Flippa

You don’t even have to start a blog from scratch to sell with profit. You can “flip” a blog: buy a blog that already makes some revenue, improve it, and then sell. Repeatedly. 

Before we wrap this section up, there may be even more ways to monetize than the mentioned nine (depending on the niche). For example, according to Pinch of Yum’s ebook, there are as many as 16 ways you can monetize a food blog. Did you know that you could make money by developing recipes and licensing them? 

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Final thoughts 

So now you know what types of blogs can generate an income, how to find traffic-generating topics even if you don’t know anything about the niche, and nine ways to monetize your blog (or blogs). 

But how about actually writing a blog post? We’ve got you covered—check out our guide to writing blog posts that people will actually want to read. 

What’s next? Learn how to promote your blog through various marketing channels and a number of tried and tested tactics: 

Got questions or comments? Let me know on Twitter or Mastodon.



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Understanding the Impact of Google’s November 2024 Core Update on Global Search Rankings

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Understanding the Impact of Google's November 2024 Core Update on Global Search Rankings

Introduction

In November 2024, Google launched its latest core algorithm update, a broad refinement designed to enhance the quality of its search engine results. Rolling out over approximately two weeks, the update continues Google’s ongoing commitment to delivering more relevant, useful, and high-quality search experiences for users worldwide. This article explores the nature of the November 2024 Core Update, its potential impact on websites, and strategies for site owners to adapt and thrive in its aftermath​.

1. What Is a Google Core Update?

Core updates are large-scale changes to Google’s search algorithms. Unlike targeted updates aimed at specific sectors or issues, core updates broadly impact all regions and languages. They reflect Google’s effort to re-evaluate how content is assessed and ranked based on relevance, usefulness, and reliability. Previous updates include significant releases like the March and August 2024 updates, illustrating the frequency and scope of these changes​.

2. Goals of the November 2024 Core Update

The November update focuses on refining the quality of search results. According to Google’s official statements, it seeks to amplify genuinely useful content while reducing the visibility of content primarily designed to manipulate rankings without meeting user needs. This effort emphasizes Google’s consistent push for “people-first” content—engaging and useful information that serves users, not search engines​.

3. Key Features and Characteristics of the Update

  • Global Impact: The update affects search rankings on a global scale and is not confined to any particular industry or niche​.
  • Rollout Duration: Spanning about two weeks, the rollout’s timing allows Google to fully implement algorithmic changes and assess their effects.
  • Broad Adjustments: The update doesn’t target specific sites but involves systemic reassessment across Google’s ranking systems.
  • Dynamic Search Environment: This core update follows in the footsteps of the August and March 2024 updates, representing a year of significant search result refinement​.

4. What This Means for Site Owners

  • Traffic Fluctuations: Websites may observe shifts in rankings and traffic during the update’s rollout and subsequent completion. These changes highlight the dynamic nature of Google search and require continuous monitoring and adaptation​.
  • Recommended Actions:
    • Wait and Analyze: Site owners experiencing changes should wait until the rollout’s completion before making significant adjustments.
    • Utilize Google Search Console: Compare traffic and ranking data from before and after the update to identify potential areas of improvement.
    • Focus on High-Impact Pages: Pages with notable drops in ranking should undergo thorough content evaluation using Google’s guidelines

5. Recovery and Adaptation Strategies

Recovering from a negative impact due to a core update may take weeks or months as Google’s systems adjust and validate content changes. Site owners should prioritize delivering high-quality, reliable, and user-focused content. Specific steps include:

  1. Content Evaluation: Assess content against Google’s guidelines, focusing on readability, user satisfaction, and factual accuracy.
  2. No Quick Fixes: Avoid superficial changes aimed solely at improving rankings. Sustainable improvements are more valuable and impactful​(November 2024 core upda…).
  3. People-First Content: Ensure content serves real user needs, as opposed to purely SEO-driven objectives. This aligns with Google’s long-term priorities for search quality​

6. Comparative Analysis with Previous Updates

The November 2024 Core Update continues trends observed in previous updates like March and August 2024. While each update has its nuances, their collective goal remains consistent: bettering search quality and delivering relevant results. Comparing data from these updates can reveal patterns and offer insights into Google’s evolving criteria​

7. Broader Implications for the SEO Industry

Google’s ongoing core updates underscore the critical importance of a user-centric approach to SEO. For digital marketers and SEO specialists, adapting strategies to these updates involves staying informed, using reliable analytics tools, and keeping content fresh and engaging. The need for adaptability is paramount, as Google continually shifts the parameters of what defines quality content

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Conclusion

The November 2024 Core Update serves as a reminder that Google’s algorithmic changes are not designed to punish but to reward helpful, authentic, and user-focused content. Site owners and marketers who embrace this philosophy are better positioned to weather core updates and even benefit from improved rankings and traffic over time. By maintaining a focus on user experience, transparency, and relevance, creators can align with Google’s evolving standards and thrive in the ever-changing digital landscape

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SEO

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. 

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. 

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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.

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.

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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.

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. 

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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:

  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.

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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. 

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. 

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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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SEO

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.

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.

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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:

“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.

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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:

“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:

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“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.

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.

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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.

The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

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“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:

  • 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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