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50+ Business-Building Local SEO Tactics For SMBs

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50+ Business-Building Local SEO Tactics For SMBs

Do you have a local small to medium-sized business (SMB)?

If so, you know just how difficult it is to get found and stand out in increasingly competitive search results.

Local SEO strategies must adapt to new features and algorithm updates by the top search engines that affect local search results.

Most local SEO tactics fall into the following three categories.

  • Optimizing local listings and citations.
  • Optimizing your website and its content.
  • Optimizing and working on incoming links.

In this column, you’ll find over 50 specific things you can do right now to help improve your visibility in local search results, divided into those categories above.

Optimizing Local Listings & Citations

Let’s start with your NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) data.

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In order to get listed and ranked in Google Maps, you need to be a legitimate business, and in some areas, you’ll need a business license (depending on the type of business you’re in).

That NAP needs to be consistent and listed the same everywhere or you’ll have problems later on.

Before you get started with local listings and citations, you’ll also need the following:

  • NAP of the business.
  • Website URL (list of internal location pages if more than one location).
  • A short description (up to 50 characters) that should include your main city name and type of business.
  • A longer description (up to 250 characters) that describes who you are and what you do. Include the city name and areas served if applicable.
  • Recent photos of your business.
  • Category of your business.
  • Keywords (that you’d like to rank for). These are typical “city name keyword” type keywords.

The main strategy for local listings and local citations is to get as many as feasible in the right category, with consistent information such as your NAP data.

Screenshot by author, March 2022

Local citations are mentions of a local business, which includes NAP data. Local citations may or may not include a link to your website. There are generally two strategies for getting local citations:

  • Get the local listings yourself.
  • Hire someone else to get them for you.

Taking the time to get local citations yourself can be a really big project, especially if you’re in a competitive industry in your area.

Competitors could have up to hundreds of thousands of local citations, which is nearly impossible to do manually.

If you’re a local business (SMB) in a fairly non-competitive market, then getting a handful of local citations manually is a good strategy. If that’s the case, a non-competitive local SEO strategy for local citations is to get these listings:

  • Google Business Profile.
  • Facebook.
  • Yahoo! Local (currently requires a payment to Yext).
  • Apple Maps.
  • Bing Places for Business.
  • MapQuest.
  • Yelp.
  • BBB.org.
  • FourSquare.
  • TripAdvisor.
  • Angie’s List.
  • TrustRatings.
  • YellowPages.
  • Home Advisor.
  • Thumbtack.

The last two on the list are specific to certain industries, and you’ll want to search certain directories that are specific to your local business’ industry.

Typically, these are easy to find — they’ll rank in the top 10 search results (on the first page).

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BrightLocal has a list of top local citations for the U.S. that they maintain.

Submitting to directories (and getting listed) will allow your local business to take advantage of what’s often referred to as “barnacle SEO.”

Your business gets listed on pages on other websites that rank well for a certain keyword you’re targeting.

So for [Dallas carpenters], Google lists sites like Yelp.com, homeadvisor.com, thumbtack.com, houzz.com, and angi.com.

Getting listed on those sites will bring the business leads, as they’re ranking well in Google.

Once you have secured (and verified) those local listings, the next local SEO strategy is to get listed with the main data aggregators. There are three:

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  • Data Axle (formerly InfoGroup) – Submit your business here.
  • Acxiom  – Register then submit your business here.
  • Localeze – Register then submit your business here.

The data aggregators will take the information of the local business and aggregate it (make it available for literally thousands of websites to use).

Be sure you’re using the correct NAP data and website URLs, as once the data aggregators get hold of your data, it’s tough to get it corrected and updated and can take quite some time.

Using A Third Party For Local Citations & Listings

Another local SEO strategy is to outsource local citations and listings.

Several third-party businesses allow you to submit your local business listing to them (the NAP data, short and long descriptions, URLs, etc.), and they will then use their connections to get that data on other websites.

Many have agreements with certain data providers, and can efficiently get hundreds, thousands, and even hundreds of thousands of local citations.

These third-party services include:

  • BrightLocal.
  • MozLocal.
  • Yext.
  • Advice Local.
  • SEMrush Listing Management Tool.
  • Whitespark.
  • Synup.

Some of these services are better than others, mainly because of the agreements they have with other websites and their technology.

Some submit to only 30 websites, and others like Advice Local will end up getting a local business thousands upon thousands of local citations, many of which include a link to the website.

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Be wary of any third-party websites that set up a local listing on behalf of the local business but won’t give the local business the login and password for those listings.

Reviews Are Key

Getting reviews of your local business, especially on Google, is going to help rankings and it will encourage others to visit your business.

People do read reviews online, especially for service-type businesses (hotels, resorts, carpet cleaners, home inspectors, carpenters, and even car dealerships).

So, if your local business is a service-type business or another business where reviews are important, then creating a good strategy for dealing with reviews is key.

Local businesses need to request and encourage their customers to leave a review.

There are a lot of ways to encourage customers to leave a review.

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Some businesses post a plaque at the business asking for reviews. Other SMBs encourage reviews by offering a “prize” each month to a random reviewer (one local business I frequent gives away an Apple iPad once a month to a random reviewer).

The local business should respond to reviews just as quickly as they are left, regardless if it’s a positive or negative review.

If it’s a positive review or comment, thank the customer for leaving a review.

If it’s negative, deal with it quickly and offer to take the issue offline to minimize any future problems and the negative review getting out of hand.

Even if you miss responding to a review, it’s perfectly okay to respond to reviews left several months in the past.

If the review shows up and can be seen easily, then I recommend responding to the review.

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Too many local businesses will take the time to verify their local listings but won’t properly deal with reviews and respond to them in a timely manner.

Local businesses should take the time to develop a strategy for encouraging reviews, tell employees what that strategy is, and designate one or two people to respond to reviews.

Here are a few other ways to manage reviews:

  • Designate one or two employees to read reviews and handle review responses.
  • Encourage reviews by asking your customers when they check out or pay for services.
  • Send customers a letter or postcard in the mail, asking for a review after you provide services.
  • Outsource review monitoring and response. Typically, your social media or SEO company (or consultant) will help monitor and respond to reviews. If not, hire someone part-time to handle it for you.
  • Add a link on your website to a few other places where customers can leave a review. On the Google Maps listing, for example, Google provides a link to the listing that you can share.
  • Add a form on your website so they can anonymously leave a review (or leave their contact info if preferred). There are plugins available that will help you post those reviews on your website. This is especially helpful for businesses that sell products directly on their websites.
  • Create a comment box at your business, and provide a pen/pencil and forms. On the form, add a line for the customer’s email address. Ask them if you can post their review or testimonial online. Or, if you have their email address, email them and ask them to leave a review online.

Reviews sent directly to the business can be posted on the company’s website (with the permission of the customer). Reviews left on a third-party website (like on Google, Yelp, etc.) cannot be copied and posted on the company’s website.

Reviews on third-party websites have in fact been given extra weight lately by Google. So sites like these, where customers can leave reviews and feedback, could potentially help with local rankings on Google:

  • Yelp (yelp.com).
  • Trip Advisor (tripadvisor.com).
  • Yellowpages (yp.com).
  • Better Business Bureau (BBB.org).
  • Manta (manta.com).
  • Angie’s List (angieslist.com).
  • Foursquare (foursquare.com).
  • Facebook (facebook.com).

Another way to get more local reviews is to create a postcard or handout that’s given to customers.

Tell them you’d like their feedback, and use that feedback to make your business even better.

They can leave you a review on your website, or on any of these third-party websites (list the websites where you’d like them to leave a review).

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Optimizing Your Local Website’s Content

Without going into too much detail about optimizing a local website, there are several on-site local SEO strategies that are important to consider:

  • Optimize for “Near Me” search queries.
  • Optimize for local.
  • Be a local content machine.
  • Buy a local website or blog.
Local Search on GoogleScreenshot by author, March 2022

Optimize For “Near Me” Search Queries

In the past, there have been more people using “near me” in the number of search queries, such as [restaurants near me] or [pharmacies near me].

Those two search queries assume the search engine knows where the searcher is located.

While “near me” isn’t necessarily gaining in popularity as it once was five years ago, it’s still used quite often.

I recommend doing your own keyword research and specifically looking to see if “near me” is used in search queries in your area.

If there’s a significant amount of searches, you may want to optimize at least one page on your website for “near me” related keywords.

Local Ranking Factors

Advice Local came out with their list of 2021 Local Ranking Factors, which is worth reviewing.

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Specifically, they found that the local SEO experts that contributed to the list of ranking factors said that these are important:

A properly optimized GBP listing is the most important ranking “factor.”

So, it’s important to optimize your Google Business Profile listing.

Reviews are important, as well as responding to those reviews.

Then one of the “rising” important factors is the optimization of your website’s pages, which is the “On-Page” referred to above.

For example, make sure that your website has the proper Local Schema markup code, and the NAP data there matches the information in your GBP exactly, especially the name.

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Work on getting more backlinks specifically to your individual location pages that include “city name + keyword” in the anchor text of the links.

Be A Local Content Machine

One interesting tactic or “local SEO strategy” I’ve seen lately that works well is becoming a local content machine.

Essentially, by adding a blog to your local business website and writing about local news and events, you’re producing content that others in the city will want to read and share, especially on social networks.

While you’re not necessarily writing about your local business, you’re branding the business locally. When someone wants or needs a company’s services, they’ll think of your business first since they’ve seen it so much online.

A local auto accident and personal injury attorney hired a writer to write articles every single day about accidents in their city.

While they weren’t targeting the actual victims they wrote about, the social media shares went up dramatically and the attorney got his name out there in front of people in the city.

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Those social media shares did end up creating links to the website, which in turn helped local rankings.

Buy A Local Website Or Blog

If you’re looking to add a lot of content fairly quickly to your local business website, consider purchasing a local website that already has the content you need.

It could be a local hobby website with local news or articles, or it could be a local blog that has the content.

Perhaps the owner doesn’t have the heart to keep up with the content like they used to or they could just use the money.

Approach a local website or blog about buying their site and incorporating and moving their content over to your local business website.

Setting up redirects from the old domain name to your local business website will help pass any link equity and history over to your local business.

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Optimizing And Working On Links

Links to your website have always been an important search engine ranking factor and will continue to be in the future.

Google’s algorithm has always favored links to a website.

But back in 2016, there was a stronger emphasis on links when Google released its Google Possum algorithm update.

Local links or links from other local businesses and organizations have been important for years, and are still a very important part of a local SEO strategy today.

Greg Gifford, Vice President of Search at SearchLab.com, recommends that you can “find easy link opportunities by looking at the relationships you already have.”

Local sponsorships, local volunteer opportunities, and local offline groups can all lead to local links.

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Need more ideas for local links? Use Majestic.com to analyze the link profiles of similar businesses in another city.

Another local SEO strategy for local links is to get links from competitors.

Use a web crawler such as the Screaming Frog SEO Spider to crawl their website and review all of your competitors’ outgoing links.

Then, see if there are any links you can get from websites your competitors are linking to.

Essentially, those competitors are passing link credit or PageRank to the other website that then passes it to your website.

Additional Local SEO Tips

Those are a few local SEO strategies that will help local search engine rankings.

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But, if that wasn’t enough, here are a bunch more local SEO tips and pointers that you may not have thought of yet.

Local Listings

Undoubtedly, the number one local search ranking factor is the “proximity of the business to the point of search.”

How far is the business away from the person who is doing the search?

For example, Google knows where the searcher is (especially if they are using a mobile phone).

The closer the business is to the person doing the searching, the more likely that business will show up in the Google Maps and Google local listings in the search results.

Some businesses have been known to get a “virtual office” location (or multiple virtual office locations) just for this reason, especially if the customer never visits their location.

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While this is a local SEO strategy I don’t endorse, it’s a local SEO strategy worth noting – as a company’s competitors might be doing it.

Keep your local online listings up to date.

If you know you have an update to your NAP data, make sure it gets changed online as soon as possible.

If you’re moving, start updating your local listings.

As soon as you know the new address, start updating local listings online.

It can take months for websites to update your listing, so the sooner you start, the better.

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Just as you update your “snail mail” with the US Postal Service when you move to a new location, you’ll want to make sure your local listings are updated as well.

As previously mentioned, the address with the USPS should be the same exact address used in your local listings.

Search engines most likely have access to USPS data and inconsistencies can lead to local ranking problems.

Consistency is key when it comes to NAP data and your business’s ability to rank well locally.

Make sure your local listings are consistent and the same as it is on your website.

Audit your local citations.

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Inconsistent NAP data across multiple websites is one of the issues I see a lot.

Auditing your local citations to make sure your NAP is consistent everywhere can really help local SEO.

You might have multiple phone numbers, different versions of your address, or even a different address on some websites that list your NAP data.

Removing duplicate listings and updating inconsistencies can make a huge difference.

Add updated photos on a regular basis to local profiles.

Get on a regular schedule of taking new photos of your location and your business. Add new photos on Google Business Profile, your Facebook page, and other sites that will accept photos such as Yelp.

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Add a budget for local ads.

Use Google AdWords to target specific locations and target potential customers in your area. Google is now offering ads on Google Maps listings, so setting aside a budget for those ads will pay off.

Work on getting more reviews.

It’s always a constant battle to get more online reviews than your competitors – but it’s worth it in the long run.

Ask customers for reviews – in-store, at your location, and even via email if you have your customers’ email addresses.

Ask for a review on Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor if you’re a hotel or resort.

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Always respond in a timely manner to every review that’s left, whether it’s a positive or negative review.

On-Site Local SEO

Add marked-up schema.org code to your NAP on your website.

The name, address, and phone number on your site should be marked up with the proper code.

It won’t affect how it displays on your site, but the schema.org code will tell search engines just that – that it’s your name, address, and phone number.

You can also add the markup in JSON-LD (JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data) code, which can help Google know about your NAP.

Add the proper link to your telephone number.

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Adding a “tel://” type of link to your phone number where it’s listed on your site will allow mobile visitors to click on the link and call you.

This can also help search engines display your phone number in the phone call extension area in mobile search results.

Speed up your website’s load time.

Optimizing your site for mobile devices can seriously (and quickly) help rankings.

I’ve seen Google send more traffic to a website just because the website loads faster than it did before. This might mean moving web hosts, redesigning the website, or using a CDN.

All photos of your business should be tagged with the appropriate location information and keywords.

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Use an EXIF editor to add location information, keywords, and descriptions of each photo. Each image file can be updated with this information, which can include geotagged location information.

Multiple locations? Create a section on your website for each location.

Don’t create just one page for each location, add additional content if possible.

Each location will have its own unique personality with its location and employees. Why not consistently add content relevant to each location? Add a blog, and add photos to make it relevant.

Use the proper syntax and keywords in your URLs.

For each location, use a format like www.domain.com/location/. Link to each location in the main navigation on your website, but don’t link to sub-pages under each location.

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Consolidate separate websites for each location to one main website.

If you’ve set up a separate domain name and website for each location, move those websites to your main site.

Redirect the domain names with 301 redirects and move the content to sub-sections on your main website.

Each location will feed off of the main website’s authority to become more powerful. Don’t forget to update your location’s local listings so they point to the new URL on the main website as well.

Some local search queries can trigger featured snippets.

Depending on your topic, you can increase your website traffic and visibility by showing up in “position zero” for some search queries.

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Position zero is the “featured snippet” that Google shows above all of the other search engine listings.

Use SEMrush.com to analyze the keywords you’re currently ranking for, and see if any of them include a featured snippet.

Optimize the content to show up for the featured snippet. Other search queries may also trigger the knowledge graph, instant answer, local pack carousel, or images that you can optimize for.

Make sure you’re using HTTPS.

While you may not be taking credit cards or personal information on your website, moving your entire website to an SSL secure server will give you a leg up.

HTTPS is now a search engine ranking factor for Google, and many local businesses haven’t moved their websites to HTTPS yet.

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So moving to HTTPS will put you ahead of your competition. It’s important to make sure that links that you’ve had for a while, such as local citations, point to the HTTPS version of your website.

Add a blog.

Write blog posts on a regular basis about local news, local issues, and local events. Post those on social media and link back to your blog post.

Photos are always liked by local residents, and quite often they’re shared.

Local SEO Audits

Perform an audit of your website.

There are several different types of audits available, including link audits, on-page audits, and local citation audits.

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Local citation audits are good for identifying duplicate listings and inconsistent NAP data.

I’ve recently seen a rash of negative SEO being done in the local listings, with some businesses receiving listings being built “for them” with bad data, courtesy of competitors.

A local citation audit can identify a lot of these issues so you can deal with them properly.

Link audits are important, as local maps algorithms are increasingly relying on link data.

Having low-quality links and off-topic links pointing to your website can hurt rankings.

On-page audits are also important to identify areas for improvement on your website.

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Fixing issues like formatting, metadata, heading, and even page load speed can improve rankings.

Off-Site Local SEO

Get your customers’ email addresses and use that data to target them on Facebook or for an email newsletter.

You can upload your customers’ email addresses and phone numbers to Facebook and target them with ads.

Then, create a lookalike campaign on Facebook to target even more people with the same demographics as your current customers.

Optimize for voice search.

More people are using voice search to find local businesses. They use voice search to help them find a business near them.

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For example, they might ask, “Where is the nearest Italian restaurant?” Check out the Local SEO Guide study of “near me” local SEO ranking factors that I previously mentioned. It’s an interesting read.

Use the barnacle SEO strategy.

For your main keywords (the ones you want to rank for), take a look at who is currently ranking – and it may not be your own website.

If you can optimize your listing or show up well on another site that’s currently ranking for your keyword, then you’ll still see some traffic and get business.

If a Yelp, Home Advisor, Thumbtack, Angie’s List, or BBB page is ranking, then make sure your local business is listed on those pages.

Participate and sponsor local events, organizations, and non-profits.

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These will increase your local visibility and will quite often include a link back to your website, which ultimately helps your search engine rankings.

Final Thoughts

It takes a holistic approach to optimize your website for search. The combination of on-site optimizations and offsite listings and links will help boost your SMB’s visibility in local search results.

More Resources:


Featured Image: Olivier Le Moal/Shutterstock




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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.

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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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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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