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5 Ways You Can Really Steal Organic Clicks from Industry Giants

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5 ways you can really steal organic clicks from industry giants via helenpollitt1

The giants of fairy-tales have three things going for them: strength, resources, and infamy.

In a similar way, our industry giants often dominate the searches due to the strength of their team, the resources of a large budget, and their brand fame.

A household name, a large team of experts, and a budget to rival the plunder of a fantasy kingdom, isn’t a luxury we all have as search marketers.

So how do you stand out from the crowd in a marketplace dominated by industry giants with resources out of your reach?

We are going to explore ways to win organic clicks and conversions away from the big, established players in your space while working with budgets a fraction of theirs.

In just five steps, I’m going to show you how you can prepare your website to bring down the giants.

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1. Look for Their Weaknesses

The first step in competing against the dominant brands is assessing where they have weaknesses.

Content Gap Analysis

Start with a content audit. Using a tool like Ahrefs, you get an understanding of what keywords you are ranking for, which they are not.

In Ahrefs you can enter your domain and a couple of the sites of competitors who are also in the top 5 organic search results into the “Content Gap” feature and compare it with the number one player in your industry.

This will show you which keywords you and your competitors are ranking for which the giant is not. This gives you an idea of where your competitive edge is.

For example, I have chosen the industry “wooden sheds” and entered two websites and the brand I am keen on improving.

If the giant I’m wishing to take down is Homebase, a large home improvement and gardening store here in the UK, then I can see that the keywords they are not ranking for, but some or all of the smaller brands are.

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This gives me an idea that I can compete more easily for terms such as “potting shed” and “playhouses”, both with a high monthly search volume but not something the giant is currently targeting.

Screenshot from Ahrefs Content Gap report

Screenshot from Ahrefs’ “Content Gap” report

Content Format Gaps

The other aspect you should be looking at in your content gap analysis is the formats of content that are not being utilized by your heavyweight competitor.

Whatever your industry there is always the scope to go outside of the standard “text on a page” template for your site.

Diagrams, videos, and audio files all increase the ways your website can be found through search. You can easily use a crawler to search the code of a site for the indicators that it is using formats such as PDFs and even videos.

For more detail on how to use a web crawler and custom extraction to identify types of content on a page, such as YouTube iframes, take a look at Screaming Frog’s guide to web scraping and data extraction.

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Once you have an idea of what content your competitors are not using you can start to take advantage of that gap.

For instance, producing video guides to explain how to set up the technical products you are both selling, or the audio explanation of complicated medical topics could give you that edge in usability and conversion.

Make a Display of Strength

Improving how your content is displayed in the search results can be an easy shot to take against a behemoth competitor.

Oftentimes, due to the sheer volume of products or pages on a site, they rely on templated page titles and descriptions rather than having the time or facility to craft them all by hand. Use that to your advantage.

Writing a compelling meta description to encourage click-through might seem like a fundamental of SEO.

Up against the likes of Amazon, however, whose inventory is in the millions, it can cause you to get the click even if you aren’t out-ranking them.

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Mark up Your Unique Content

The best way to maximize the effectiveness of the content types you are utilizing that your competitors aren’t, is by using schema markup.

This will enable some search engines to pull through this information and display it in the SERPs in a more appealing way than a standard search result.

For example, if you choose to use videos on your site you can mark them up in such a way that Google can use them to populate the video carousel, a spot in the SERPs that is reserved purely for videos.

Even if your giant has great written copy that answers a user’s question it will not be able to outrank the video you created that visually answers their query.

Aim for Featured Snippets

The holy grail of search results, the featured snippet, evens the playing field when it comes to search rankings.

No matter if your site is not ranking in first position for a search query, you are still eligible to appear in the “position 0” placement if your content best answers the user’s search.

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Studying the search results related to your industry can allow you to see when featured snippets are appearing and what is the content currently populating this area.

Google’s John Mueller has shared some details on how to rank for featured snippets.

Use Your Other Resources

If you are lucky enough to have access to paid search accounts for your brand then make sure you are using the data gathered from them. Analyze the converting terms that are relevant to the campaign you are running.

Larger brands may well find their teams working in silos, or even outsourcing elements of their campaigns to different agencies which means the cross-channel insight is harder to come by. Use this to your advantage.

2. Be Quick & Nimble

Juggernauts are intimidating, but they are also slow. The benefit of a small company or agency is the speed in which you can pivot.

If a campaign is not effective, getting sign-off to learn from it and try something new is not as much of a bureaucracy-laced endeavor as with a large brand.

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Quick to React to New Opportunities

Many enterprise businesses have several layers of authorization required to make the smallest change.

Being able to adapt quickly to a change in the market or capitalize on a new audience gives your SEO team the edge.

Keeping an eye on what is performing well on social media can help you to ride the wave of an emerging trend.

This kind of adaptation is often out of reach for larger brands who are beholden to strict marketing and content plans that cannot be deviated from easily.

Through your understanding of market trends and the ability to move swiftly, you can create content for digital PR purposes a lot quicker than a team that is on a strict content plan.

Make Changes Swiftly

An extensive development queue is frequently a barrier to getting changes implemented to a website quickly.

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Often, there are other priority tasks your in-house or agency developers are focusing their time on. Multiply this delay by ten for an enterprise site.

Being able to talk to your developers and ask them about priorities is a huge benefit that comes from working in a smaller company.

You may still be outsourcing your development work, but chances are you have a direct dial to a member of their development team or your account manager rather than having to submit a request and escalate it through slower, more official channels.

Make sure you take advantage of this closer working relationship by:

  • Discussing your needs with your development team.
  • Educating them on the importance of SEO, if it’s an area they are not familiar with.

3. Identify Your Secret Weapon

Your secret weapon against strong competitors is likely going to come out of your ability to focus your time and efforts where they cannot.

Stay Local

In some instances, this could be within a local community.

If your business serves people from a physical location, you are far better placed to rank for queries with a local intent than a purely ecommerce site.

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If your large competitors also have brick-and-mortar stores but not in a location near yours, then your niche will be your local area.

Your small business that is in the heart of a community will be able to gain relevant local links from charities, sports clubs and community events in that area far easier than a large multinational corporation.

If you have a handful of shops across a small area, you are more likely to be able to spend time building relationships with local contacts than a centralized SEO team for a company that has hundreds of locations to cover.

Highlight Skills & Expertise

Another great way of differentiating your client or your company from larger competitors is by using its staff to build authority for your site.

The chances of the CEO of a company that has 100 employees being open to working with you to secure local media coverage is higher than one who is overseeing a 10,000-strong company and not even resident in the country you are optimizing the site for.

Expertise within the brand you are trying to promote will be more accessible within a smaller organization than it would be within a massive one.

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Get to know the experts within your brand and start looking for opportunities for them to contribute to digital PR efforts.

Data that has been produced through their research or their expert opinion on a topical subject will go far in promoting the website as a source of authoritative information within the industry.

Keep the Battle Small

One of the key points to remember in taking on a giant is that you are only going to be able to beat them in certain conditions.

For example, you have no hope (or need) to beat Amazon in the SERPs for “cheap pillow cases” if you are a retailer of luxury perfume.

It is key to look at the few pages within their site which are actually competing against your website and identify how you can outrank those.

It may be that you can earn better, more relevant links to your product pages than your big competitor can purely because they have more products so their team’s time will be spread more thinly than yours.

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Be Bold

One weakness larger brands have is very tight brand guidelines and sign-off procedures that stop innovation from occurring.

As a smaller brand, you have the opportunity to be bolder in your marketing.

Whether this takes the form of irreverent calls to action in your meta descriptions or taking a swipe at the competitor through a comparison article, you have the option to make an impact where a larger brand is wrapped in red-tape.

4. Develop Your Battle Plan

The key to winning any fight in the SERPs is having a great strategy.

In the case of fighting industry giants, it is imperative that you are developing a battle plan that capitalizes on their weaknesses we’ve already discussed.

Add the Value They Can’t

In many cases, this includes answering the queries they are not. This will likely be long-tail searches that require in-depth research.

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A great source of material to start your long-tail strategy off is user forums.

Subreddits can be a gold mine of information on the sorts of questions users want answers to but cannot find an answer to online.

Through sites like this, Quora and Answer The Public, it’s possible to build up a picture of what your target audience is interested in but don’t necessarily have access to.

Use this to create content that engages your target audience in a way that your competitors aren’t.

Bring the Fight to Your Battlefield

It might be that the players dominating the industry on Google are not as hot in other search engines, or indeed, are neglecting other channels altogether.

A key question to ask is, are you ranking in the right search engines?

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For instance, it may be that due to their lack of video content that you identified through your content gap analysis they are not visible on YouTube at all.

Is this a channel that you can exploit further? Don’t fall into the trap of only fighting them on one front.

Consider more industry-specific search engines, like TripAdvisor, is this a more level playing field for you to thrive in?

By looking outside of your primary search engine you can open up another line of attack that might not be where their efforts are focused.

5. If You Can’t Beat Them, Join Them

Another option is that if your industry behemoth is actually a marketplace or reseller, like Amazon, it may be a good move for your brand to start selling through them.

This sort of decision is usually outside the purview of a digital marketer, especially if you are working within an agency, rather than in-house.

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However, it may be within your remit to make recommendations and use the data you are gathering as part of your reports to encourage this to be considered.

For brands that aren’t ecommerce, another option is to piggyback off the success of your industry competitor and look at partnering with them.

Can you write for their blog so you are getting traffic through referrals from their site and raising your profile with their audience?

For instance, sites in the UK targeting medical information terms such as “eczema treatment” will likely find themselves outranked by the National Health Service (NHS). However, this site does link out to reputable, authoritative websites that may give more specialized advice than they do.

If you stop looking at links as only being there to boost your backlink profile and see them as avenues to raise your profile with your audience, then you could find traffic and engagement rising drastically.

Conclusion

It isn’t impossible to steal organic traffic from the big players in your industry. It’s just daunting.

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Put together a robust plan of attack and you should be able to start chipping away at their organic traffic and building up your own.

Soon, you might find you start to level out in size.

More Resources:


Image Credits

All screenshots taken by author, August 2019

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How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

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Step-by-Step: How to Optimize Old Blog Posts for SEO

Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.

If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.

However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.

Ways to Optimize Older Content 

Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort. 

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Refresh Content 

If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.

Rewrite Old Blog Posts 

When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely. 

This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.

Delete Old Blog Posts 

You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it. 

Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.

Promote Old Blog Posts 

Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.

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Which Blog Posts Should You Update?

Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit. 

Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.

If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings. 

Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic. 

With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.

How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.

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Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.

Conduct New Keyword Research

Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic. 

Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too. 

Look for New Ranking Opportunities

When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it. 

Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags

If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags. 

Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:

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  1. Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
  2. Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
  3. Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made. 

Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page. 

Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags. 

Replace Outdated Information and Statistics

Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.

Tighten or Expand Ideas

Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more. 

Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:

  • Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
  • Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
  • Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
  • Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
  • Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
  • Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
  • Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.

Improve Visuals and Other Media

No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality. 

Update Internal and External Links

Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.

You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.

Optimize for Conversions

When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years. 

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So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.

Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post. 

Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.

Key Takeaway

Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions. 

By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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

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

The new guide has six sections:

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

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

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

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

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

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Google explains:

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

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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