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7 Steps To Boost Your Site’s Crawlability And Indexability

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7 Steps To Boost Your Site’s Crawlability And Indexability

Keywords and content may be the twin pillars upon which most search engine optimization strategies are built, but they’re far from the only ones that matter.

Less commonly discussed but equally important – not just to users but to search bots – is your website’s discoverability.

There are roughly 50 billion webpages on 1.93 billion websites on the internet. This is far too many for any human team to explore, so these bots, also called spiders, perform a significant role.

These bots determine each page’s content by following links from website to website and page to page. This information is compiled into a vast database, or index, of URLs, which are then put through the search engine’s algorithm for ranking.

This two-step process of navigating and understanding your site is called crawling and indexing.

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As an SEO professional, you’ve undoubtedly heard these terms before, but let’s define them just for clarity’s sake:

  • Crawlability refers to how well these search engine bots can scan and index your webpages.
  • Indexability measures the search engine’s ability to analyze your webpages and add them to its index.

As you can probably imagine, these are both essential parts of SEO.

If your site suffers from poor crawlability, for example, many broken links and dead ends, search engine crawlers won’t be able to access all your content, which will exclude it from the index.

Indexability, on the other hand, is vital because pages that are not indexed will not appear in search results. How can Google rank a page it hasn’t included in its database?

The crawling and indexing process is a bit more complicated than we’ve discussed here, but that’s the basic overview.

If you’re looking for a more in-depth discussion of how they work, Dave Davies has an excellent piece on crawling and indexing.

How To Improve Crawling And Indexing

Now that we’ve covered just how important these two processes are let’s look at some elements of your website that affect crawling and indexing – and discuss ways to optimize your site for them.

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1. Improve Page Loading Speed

With billions of webpages to catalog, web spiders don’t have all day to wait for your links to load. This is sometimes referred to as a crawl budget.

If your site doesn’t load within the specified time frame, they’ll leave your site, which means you’ll remain uncrawled and unindexed. And as you can imagine, this is not good for SEO purposes.

Thus, it’s a good idea to regularly evaluate your page speed and improve it wherever you can.

You can use Google Search Console or tools like Screaming Frog to check your website’s speed.

If your site is running slow, take steps to alleviate the problem. This could include upgrading your server or hosting platform, enabling compression, minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, and eliminating or reducing redirects.

Figure out what’s slowing down your load time by checking your Core Web Vitals report. If you want more refined information about your goals, particularly from a user-centric view, Google Lighthouse is an open-source tool you may find very useful.

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2. Strengthen Internal Link Structure

A good site structure and internal linking are foundational elements of a successful SEO strategy. A disorganized website is difficult for search engines to crawl, which makes internal linking one of the most important things a website can do.

But don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what Google’s search advocate John Mueller had to say about it:

“Internal linking is super critical for SEO. I think it’s one of the biggest things that you can do on a website to kind of guide Google and guide visitors to the pages that you think are important.”

If your internal linking is poor, you also risk orphaned pages or those pages that don’t link to any other part of your website. Because nothing is directed to these pages, the only way for search engines to find them is from your sitemap.

To eliminate this problem and others caused by poor structure, create a logical internal structure for your site.

Your homepage should link to subpages supported by pages further down the pyramid. These subpages should then have contextual links where it feels natural.

Another thing to keep an eye on is broken links, including those with typos in the URL. This, of course, leads to a broken link, which will lead to the dreaded 404 error. In other words, page not found.

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The problem with this is that broken links are not helping and are harming your crawlability.

Double-check your URLs, particularly if you’ve recently undergone a site migration, bulk delete, or structure change. And make sure you’re not linking to old or deleted URLs.

Other best practices for internal linking include having a good amount of linkable content (content is always king), using anchor text instead of linked images, and using a “reasonable number” of links on a page (whatever that means).

Oh yeah, and ensure you’re using follow links for internal links.

3. Submit Your Sitemap To Google

Given enough time, and assuming you haven’t told it not to, Google will crawl your site. And that’s great, but it’s not helping your search ranking while you’re waiting.

If you’ve recently made changes to your content and want Google to know about it immediately, it’s a good idea to submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.

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A sitemap is another file that lives in your root directory. It serves as a roadmap for search engines with direct links to every page on your site.

This is beneficial for indexability because it allows Google to learn about multiple pages simultaneously. Whereas a crawler may have to follow five internal links to discover a deep page, by submitting an XML sitemap, it can find all of your pages with a single visit to your sitemap file.

Submitting your sitemap to Google is particularly useful if you have a deep website, frequently add new pages or content, or your site does not have good internal linking.

4. Update Robots.txt Files

You probably want to have a robots.txt file for your website. While it’s not required, 99% of websites use it as a rule of thumb. If you’re unfamiliar with this is, it’s a plain text file in your website’s root directory.

It tells search engine crawlers how you would like them to crawl your site. Its primary use is to manage bot traffic and keep your site from being overloaded with requests.

Where this comes in handy in terms of crawlability is limiting which pages Google crawls and indexes. For example, you probably don’t want pages like directories, shopping carts, and tags in Google’s directory.

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Of course, this helpful text file can also negatively impact your crawlability. It’s well worth looking at your robots.txt file (or having an expert do it if you’re not confident in your abilities) to see if you’re inadvertently blocking crawler access to your pages.

Some common mistakes in robots.text files include:

  • Robots.txt is not in the root directory.
  • Poor use of wildcards.
  • Noindex in robots.txt.
  • Blocked scripts, stylesheets and images.
  • No sitemap URL.

For an in-depth examination of each of these issues – and tips for resolving them, read this article.

5. Check Your Canonicalization

Canonical tags consolidate signals from multiple URLs into a single canonical URL. This can be a helpful way to tell Google to index the pages you want while skipping duplicates and outdated versions.

But this opens the door for rogue canonical tags. These refer to older versions of a page that no longer exists, leading to search engines indexing the wrong pages and leaving your preferred pages invisible.

To eliminate this problem, use a URL inspection tool to scan for rogue tags and remove them.

If your website is geared towards international traffic, i.e., if you direct users in different countries to different canonical pages, you need to have canonical tags for each language. This ensures your pages are being indexed in each language your site is using.

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6. Perform A Site Audit

Now that you’ve performed all these other steps, there’s still one final thing you need to do to ensure your site is optimized for crawling and indexing: a site audit. And that starts with checking the percentage of pages Google has indexed for your site.

Check Your Indexability Rate

Your indexability rate is the number of pages in Google’s index divided by the number of pages on our website.

You can find out how many pages are in the google index from Google Search Console Index  by going to the “Pages” tab and checking the number of pages on the website from the CMS admin panel.

There’s a good chance your site will have some pages you don’t want indexed, so this number likely won’t be 100%. But if the indexability rate is below 90%, then you have issues that need to be investigated.

You can get your no-indexed URLs from Search Console and run an audit for them. This could help you understand what is causing the issue.

Another useful site auditing tool included in Google Search Console is the URL Inspection Tool. This allows you to see what Google spiders see, which you can then compare to real webpages to understand what Google is unable to render.

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Audit Newly Published Pages

Any time you publish new pages to your website or update your most important pages, you should make sure they’re being indexed. Go into Google Search Console and make sure they’re all showing up.

If you’re still having issues, an audit can also give you insight into which other parts of your SEO strategy are falling short, so it’s a double win. Scale your audit process with free tools like:

  1. Screaming Frog
  2. Semrush
  3. Ziptie
  4. Oncrawl
  5. Lumar

7. Check For Low-Quality Or Duplicate Content

If Google doesn’t view your content as valuable to searchers, it may decide it’s not worthy to index. This thin content, as it’s known could be poorly written content (e.g., filled with grammar mistakes and spelling errors), boilerplate content that’s not unique to your site, or content with no external signals about its value and authority.

To find this, determine which pages on your site are not being indexed, and then review the target queries for them. Are they providing high-quality answers to the questions of searchers? If not, replace or refresh them.

Duplicate content is another reason bots can get hung up while crawling your site. Basically, what happens is that your coding structure has confused it and it doesn’t know which version to index. This could be caused by things like session IDs, redundant content elements and pagination issues.

Sometimes, this will trigger an alert in Google Search Console, telling you Google is encountering more URLs than it thinks it should. If you haven’t received one, check your crawl results for things like duplicate or missing tags, or URLs with extra characters that could be creating extra work for bots.

Correct these issues by fixing tags, removing pages or adjusting Google’s access.

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8. Eliminate Redirect Chains And Internal Redirects

As websites evolve, redirects are a natural byproduct, directing visitors from one page to a newer or more relevant one. But while they’re common on most sites, if you’re mishandling them, you could be inadvertently sabotaging your own indexing.

There are several mistakes you can make when creating redirects, but one of the most common is redirect chains. These occur when there’s more than one redirect between the link clicked on and the destination. Google doesn’t look on this as a positive signal.

In more extreme cases, you may initiate a redirect loop, in which a page redirects to another page, which directs to another page, and so on, until it eventually links back to the very first page. In other words, you’ve created a never-ending loop that goes nowhere.

Check your site’s redirects using Screaming Frog, Redirect-Checker.org or a similar tool.

9. Fix Broken Links

In a similar vein, broken links can wreak havoc on your site’s crawlability. You should regularly be checking your site to ensure you don’t have broken links, as this will not only hurt your SEO results, but will frustrate human users.

There are a number of ways you can find broken links on your site, including manually evaluating each and every link on your site (header, footer, navigation, in-text, etc.), or you can use Google Search Console, Analytics or Screaming Frog to find 404 errors.

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Once you’ve found broken links, you have three options for fixing them: redirecting them (see the section above for caveats), updating them or removing them.

10. IndexNow

IndexNow is a relatively new protocol that allows URLs to be submitted simultaneously between search engines via an API. It works like a super-charged version of submitting an XML sitemap by alerting search engines about new URLs and changes to your website.

Basically, what it does is provides crawlers with a roadmap to your site upfront. They enter your site with information they need, so there’s no need to constantly recheck the sitemap. And unlike XML sitemaps, it allows you to inform search engines about non-200 status code pages.

Implementing it is easy, and only requires you to generate an API key, host it in your directory or another location, and submit your URLs in the recommended format.

Wrapping Up

By now, you should have a good understanding of your website’s indexability and crawlability. You should also understand just how important these two factors are to your search rankings.

If Google’s spiders can crawl and index your site, it doesn’t matter how many keywords, backlinks, and tags you use – you won’t appear in search results.

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And that’s why it’s essential to regularly check your site for anything that could be waylaying, misleading, or misdirecting bots.

So, get yourself a good set of tools and get started. Be diligent and mindful of the details, and you’ll soon have Google spiders swarming your site like spiders.

More Resources:


Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock



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How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

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

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

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

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

Ways to Optimize Older Content 

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

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Refresh Content 

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

Rewrite Old Blog Posts 

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

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

Delete Old Blog Posts 

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

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

Promote Old Blog Posts 

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

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Which Blog Posts Should You Update?

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

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

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

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

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

How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

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

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

Conduct New Keyword Research

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

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

Look for New Ranking Opportunities

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

Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags

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

Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:

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

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

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

Replace Outdated Information and Statistics

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

Tighten or Expand Ideas

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

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

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

Improve Visuals and Other Media

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

Update Internal and External Links

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

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

Optimize for Conversions

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

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

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

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

Key Takeaway

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

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

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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

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

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

What Is Compressibility?

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

TL/DR Of Compression

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

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

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

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

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

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

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Marc Najork

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

Dennis Fetterly

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

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

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

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

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

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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

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

They write:

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

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

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

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

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

The researchers concluded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insight Into Quality Rankings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combining Multiple Signals

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

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

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

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

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

Key Insight:

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

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

Takeaways

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

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

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

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

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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

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

The new guide has six sections:

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

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

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

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

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

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Google explains:

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

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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