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A Simple Tried & Tested Guide

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A Simple Tried & Tested Guide

You can’t control it, and its results depend on your overall marketing strategy and execution. If done right, it could become one of your most powerful marketing channels.

Let me introduce you to this often overlooked marketing channel that has had a huge impact on our business: word-of-mouth marketing.

In this article, you’ll learn the following:

So follow along and replicate our success.

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What is word-of-mouth marketing?

The terms “word of mouth” and “word-of-mouth marketing” are sometimes used interchangeably. But they’re not the same thing, and we need to define the first to understand the second.

Word of mouth (WoM) is the act of telling people about a product or a brand. For the purpose of this article, we’ll only talk about positive WoM.

Word-of-mouth marketing (WoMM) is the process of influencing and encouraging natural discussions about a product, service, or company. It refers to the incentivization of WoM.

Why is word-of-mouth marketing important?

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Research from Nielsen shows that 83% of people trust recommendations from their friends and family. It’s simply the most trustworthy and authentic marketing channel that you can’t beat no matter how great your marketing communication is.

The fact that 14,000 new customers in 2020 told us they were referred to Ahrefs by their friends is the best proof of the importance of WoMM.

Person said in registration form they learned about Ahrefs through friends

But it’s not just people you know personally who can have such an impact on your product choices. Authorities and influencers can play a similar role. For example, a well-known SEO authority, Matthew Woodward, brought us more than 500 new customers in 2020:

No. of people who found Ahrefs because of Matt

And these numbers are lowballing the WoM impact. That’s because all of these are recalled attributions. Many people don’t remember how they found out about Ahrefs, or they just don’t tell us.

Flywheel principle behind word-of-mouth marketing

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WoMM doesn’t become a crucial part of your marketing mix the moment you start focusing your attention and resources on it. It takes time, a lot of time, and flywheels can explain why.

WoMM can be referred to as a self-reinforcing marketing channel. In the beginning, you won’t see any huge effects. But as you go along, it becomes much easier to get the results. The effects can even start compounding.

You can basically use a flywheel as an analogy here. Rand Fishkin popularized the term “marketing flywheel.” You can see one of the flywheels containing WoM here:

Truly, the main marketing driver behind Ahrefs’ growth is the long-term compounding effect of WoMM combined with SEO and content marketing.

And this brings us to the tips.

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Five tried and tested tips for word-of-mouth marketing

Everything listed here is what has worked for us. You’ll generally do pretty well if you apply these practices to your marketing, but it’s not an exhaustive list of tactics. I’ll reference other noteworthy tips in the “final thoughts” section.

Tip 1. Have a superb product offering

I’ll break it to you right away. You need a great product to incentivize WoM. All the other tips and tactics won’t make up for it if you don’t.

The Ahrefs product has been at the forefront of our marketing from the start. We penetrated the SEO tools market as a backlink analysis tool back in 2010. From there, we quickly built our reputation of being the best in the market. A few years and many features later, we’ve become one of the two most used all-in-one SEO toolsets.

Your product positioning, i.e., how you portray your product to potential customers, also plays a role here. The key to this is proper market research that should guide both the product roadmap and your positioning.

Last but not least, if you’re in the SaaS industry as we are, it also helps to offer trials and/or a freemium version of your product.

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For example, introducing the free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools has helped us increase product awareness and valuable WoM for our Site Audit tool. We faced some challenges when many SEOs didn’t think of Ahrefs as a technical SEO solution.

But that’s not the case anymore:

Affiliate SEO Mastermind poll showing most people use Ahrefs' Site Audit

Tip 2. Manage your brand properly

WoM consists of how people experience your products and how they perceive your brand. The point here is that people are unlikely to recommend a good product if they don’t like the company selling it.

I can’t even remotely fit a guide to brand management here, so I just want this to be a reminder that you should always think about the bigger picture and plan for the long run.

In fact, research shows that most companies would achieve the greatest marketing effectiveness if they invested around 60% into brand-building and 40% into sales-boosting campaigns:

Line graph showing long-term brand-building is more effective than short-term sales-boosting

Here’s what proper branding looks like in our hands:

Photo of Ahrefs team and banner with rough sketches on it with words "We've been working on our product so much that we didn't have time to design this banner"

You already know it, and many other marketers know it too—the product comes first in Ahrefs. And we don’t shy away from emphasizing this in somewhat unique ways.

It’s much easier said than done, but do your best to be a likable brand. Invest in your online reputation management. The better you are at this, the more WoM you’ll get from your target audience. That group is always much larger than your customer base.

Tip 3. Focus on product-led content marketing

Content marketing is the process of creating and distributing content to attract and retain customers. Our content is the most important marketing asset we have because it generates around 1 million visits every month from organic search alone:

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Site Explorer overview of ahrefs.com

What may not be so obvious is that it’s also the main driver of our WoMM. Let me show you what I mean.

Check out this tweet, for example:

Us becoming an SEO industry authority and a go-to learning resource is actually intertwined with our rapid business growth. That’s because the content we produce is product-led. Since the Ahrefs toolset can help you solve all sorts of SEO and marketing problems, it’s easy and natural for us to pitch the product in our content.

Remember the flywheel principle? In our case, the more traffic our content gets, the more people are aware of how Ahrefs can help them, and the more they start recommending both our product and learning resources. That leads to more mentions, more links, and more traffic.

Then the circle starts again.

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These are the four steps to successfully replicate this tactic:

Step 1. Do keyword research

I’m sure you can come up with many problems your product can solve or help with. Some are more common than others, and keyword research will help you identify those.

For example, the keyword “word of mouth marketing” is searched for approximately 11K times a month globally:

Keywords Explorer overview of "word of mouth marketing"

Since I can create a valuable piece of content with unique information (our own experience with WoMM) and naturally pitch Ahrefs at the same time, it’s a great topic to target.

Recommended reading: How to Do Keyword Research for SEO

Step 2. Focus on topics with high business potential

Your keyword research will reveal tons of content ideas. You’ll need to prioritize them, so here are the criteria to assess:

  • High business potential so that you can easily pitch your product
  • High traffic potential so that you’d get a lot of organic traffic if you ranked well
  • Low Keyword Difficulty (KD) score so that it’s relatively easy to rank well

Let’s be real, though. You’ll almost never encounter topics that meet all three of these criteria. But out of those three, we generally prioritize high business potential. Because if your content isn’t product-led, your WoM will likely end at recommending your content, not your product.

We use the following scale to classify the keywords, and I recommend you use a similar approach:

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Table with scores 3 to 0. And explanation of criteria to meet each score

Recommended reading: How to Choose the Right Keywords for SEO

Step 3. Double down on proper content distribution

Creating great content takes a lot of time and effort. However, clicking the “Publish” button is only half the battle.

You should have a proper content distribution strategy that makes use of multiple marketing channels to gain traction on your content even before it manages to rank in the SERPs.

Here’s what we generally do with our content:

  • Share it on our company and personal social media accounts
  • Include it in our newsletter
  • Repurpose it into stand-alone social media posts and/or videos
  • Promote it with ads

I’d also highlight launching an outreach campaign here. We rarely do it these days. But outreach can be essential to your success, especially when you’re not that well known in the industry yet. Getting your content in front of media and industry authorities can get you great backlinks and recognition if it’s done right.

Step 4. Optimize, rinse, and repeat

Of course, creating superb product-led content isn’t a panacea to your SEO and WoMM. You’ll need a lot of patience. Also, you should apply the best SEO practices on your whole website and also follow the rest of the WoMM tips here.

Tip 4. Create or hire brand ambassadors

I believe that having brand ambassadors is the best approach to influencer marketing, which in turn can be a great boost to your WoMM.

A brand ambassador is anyone who’s regularly in the spotlight representing a company. This is often an employee with the power to influence the community. But you can form these long-term partnerships with anyone. I’m sure you follow some influencers who’ve been promoting certain products for years.

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For example, we have Patrick Stox. He’s one of the most well-known technical SEOs. He often speaks at SEO events, organizes them, and even moderates a popular industry subreddit called TechSEO.

In terms of paid campaigns, the best sponsorships and honest recommendations of our product come from our long-term customers:

Email about a podcast sponsorship request

Now, keep in mind that you won’t get the WoM benefits if you run one-off or short-term campaigns. Get the influencers and brand ambassadors to promote your products regularly.

You have the best chance by reaching out to people who are already your customers. Again, if you have a superb product, they may already be spreading the word for free anyway.

Tip 5. Build an engaged community

Having a large social media following doesn’t imply a significant WoM impact. To make this work, encourage members of your audience to engage with each other, talk about everything company- and product-related, and generally make them feel closer to you.

Here are a few community-building tips that can amplify your WoMM.

Create a group for your customers

Ahrefs Insider is our “customers only” Facebook group. At the time of writing, it has ~16,500 members:

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Ahrefs Insider FB group showing 16.5K members

Over the years, we’ve shaped this into an engaged community, with members eager to share their knowledge, answer questions, and provide input on our toolset.

You could make the argument that the bigger the group, the better for WoM. Yet we only let our customers in. Why? Well, there are two huge benefits that help spread WoM even better.

First, anyone paying even for our cheapest monthly plan must be somehow serious about SEO and familiar with our product. This ensures that there are usually good, relevant discussions that members want to engage in.

And second, once the group provides value to its members, it may create a FOMO effect for those who are not members or customers yet.

Keep your audience up to date with your product development

Got a new feature? Is it a new generation of your product? Or has something changed based on the feedback of your community? Use every distribution channel available to let them know.

There’s almost never enough exposure, so make sure you use all your social media profiles, blog updates, videos, newsletters and, of course, your own group.

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In our case, members of Ahrefs Insider know about our product updates as soon as they come out:

Tim's FB post about new updates

Rest assured, this information then gets shared on all the other distribution channels mentioned earlier.

Initiate conversations in your community

The best-case scenario for your community and WoM growth is when people engage with each other organically. This happens both inside and outside our FB group. But finding common topics and initiating those conversations amplify WoM further.

For example, we often ask our members about their opinions on certain product features or SEO and marketing topics. On top of that, we run “SEO speed dating” every month:

FB post encouraging members to interact and find work & other SEO-related opportunities

Be open, be receptive, and reflect on their feedback

Make your customers and fans feel like they’re heard (as they should be), and you’ll get closer to them as a company. This can be done via employees and brand ambassadors, making the interactions feel even more personal.

Here’s an example of our CMO, Tim Soulo, asking for product feedback in a popular SEO Reddit:

Tim's Reddit post on Big SEO asking for feedback

Needless to say, we sometimes get negative messages and feedback. That’s totally expected and natural. What may not be so common is when we say that we’ll run the feedback and suggestions by the team, we really mean that. I recommend you adopt a similar approach.

Genuinely engaging with your audience is something that only has upsides anyway. This can be even in the form of a video that responds to an FAQ:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYlL4ZN1zHA

Distribute high-quality and useful merchandise

Let’s be real. It’s likely most of the branded swag you get ends up somewhere in a drawer. But what if you produced stuff that people want to use and are even willing to pay for?

Selling your merchandise can be considered over the top. But creating some scarcity definitely drives up the demand if it’s worth it. If only a few people in a community event have a cool piece of merchandise, it can definitely spark conversations.

I often wear our t‑shirts and hoodie to industry events. Many SEOs approached me, asking how they could get the swag for themselves. I can assure you that some of them didn’t know who I am or that I work for Ahrefs.

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By the way, there are multiple ways to get our merch. One of them is public giveaways.

That being said, telling you about the other ways won’t add to the scarcity and FOMO, so let’s leave it here.

Final thoughts

You can succeed in WoMM as we did regardless of your business, especially if you already have a top-notch product.

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If we look beyond the tactics mentioned here, you may also want to consider assessing and improving your Net Promoter Score (NPS), encouraging customers to leave reviews across important platforms, or planning a gift-giving campaign with no strings attached.

All of these tactics combined are more than enough to achieve success with WoMM.

Got any questions? Ping me on Twitter.




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How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

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

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

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

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

Ways to Optimize Older Content 

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

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Refresh Content 

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

Rewrite Old Blog Posts 

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

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

Delete Old Blog Posts 

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

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

Promote Old Blog Posts 

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

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Which Blog Posts Should You Update?

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

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

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

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

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

How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

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

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

Conduct New Keyword Research

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

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

Look for New Ranking Opportunities

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

Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags

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

Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:

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

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

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

Replace Outdated Information and Statistics

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

Tighten or Expand Ideas

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

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

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

Improve Visuals and Other Media

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

Update Internal and External Links

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

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

Optimize for Conversions

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

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

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

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

Key Takeaway

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

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

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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

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

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

What Is Compressibility?

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

TL/DR Of Compression

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

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

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

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

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

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

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Marc Najork

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

Dennis Fetterly

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

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

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

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

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

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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

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

They write:

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

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

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

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

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

The researchers concluded:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insight Into Quality Rankings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combining Multiple Signals

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

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

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

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

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

Key Insight:

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

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

Takeaways

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

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

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

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

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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

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

The new guide has six sections:

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

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

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

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

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

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Google explains:

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

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

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