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A Step-by-Step Strategy (Based on Updating 50+ Posts)

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A Step-by-Step Strategy (Based on Updating 50+ Posts)

Content refreshing is one of the best ways to increase traffic of your existing content, and it’s also a great way to keep the information on your website fresh and up to date.

However, the content refreshing process isn’t always straightforward. For example, some people worry about tanking their organic traffic if they update the content (a valid concern). Other people find that it just doesn’t bring the dramatic traffic increase that some marketing experts promise.

Fortunately for you, I’ve been both of those people.

I’ve updated probably more than 50 blog posts in the past 12 months, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes. However, I’ve also seen outstanding results, such as content that drives 10 times more traffic and soars in rankings.

That said, I really wanted to know why some posts perform dramatically better post-update than others.

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So I did a data study on what makes some content dramatically more successful post-update and why others continue to flounder. Using this data, I’ve come up with a content refreshing strategy that has significantly improved my content refreshing success rate. Today, I want to share that strategy with you.

Contrary to popular belief, not all blog posts are worth updating. This is one of the single most impactful realizations that has improved my content refreshing success rate. In fact, I only recommend prioritizing updates for old content that earned 20+ monthly visitors at peak performance.

In the data study mentioned above, 45% of the updated posts had fewer than 20 visitors per month pre-update. Unfortunately, this 45% of updated posts only contributed 15% of the total traffic increase (of a 96% total organic traffic increase).

That means blog posts that already had 20+ monthly visitors before the update contributed the majority of the total organic traffic increase.

My guess is posts with more traffic pre-update already rank for some keywords in positions #5–10. Therefore, it’s much easier to go from positions #5–10 to first than zero to first.

So what should you do with blog posts that have fewer than 20 monthly visitors?

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Assuming these posts are targeting keywords that are valuable to your business or contain important thought leadership ideas, it’s definitely worth updating them. In addition, a smaller blog will generally have a lot more blog posts with fewer than 20 monthly visitors simply because it needs time to gain traction.

Therefore, it’s still worthwhile to update them, but prioritize posts with the most potential first.

How to update your blog posts

Once you know which posts to update, how do you actually update them? I’ve found that a lot of companies give freelance writers a process that looks like this:

  • Update old statistics, facts, quotes
  • Add additional paragraphs for keywords the posts are missing
  • Remove sections that are no longer relevant

However, I’ve found that the above strategy isn’t the best approach to refreshing content. It makes the content more up to date but doesn’t consider how the post is (or is not) fulfilling the search intent.

In other words, you have to ask why your content isn’t as useful as the posts ranking well on Google. (I’m willing to bet it’s not just because there’s an outdated statistic in the third paragraph.)

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From the content refreshing research I’ve done, your post probably isn’t ranking because there is another post that:

  • Is more current.
  • Provides actionable advice (or more relevant details).
  • Offers an excellent user experience.
  • Is a better fit for the searcher’s intent.

To address these issues, here are the action steps you need to take while updating your content.

1. Update outdated information

I know I just said that refreshing content is much more than just updating outdated information—but it is a part of the process.

In addition, I’m talking about more than just updating old statistics and quotes. Often, you’ll have to update (or completely change) the examples to improve how they match the search intent.

For example, this is one of my most successful content refreshing examples ever. It was generating about 4,000 monthly visitors when I first updated it in 2019. At its peak performance, it generated about 20,000 monthly visitors.

When I started updating it, I realized that most of the examples in the post were outdated and many were TV productions. This was a problem for two reasons:

  1. TV commercials themselves aren’t really a great fit for someone searching “digital marketing campaigns.”
  2. Most of the people Googling this term don’t have the budget for a TV campaign.

Therefore, I replaced all 31 examples with 31 new examples of recent SEO, content marketing, YouTube, and podcasting successes.

Excerpt of blog post that shows one of the 31 examples

Sidenote.

In retrospect, I wish I had focused on a specific campaign rather than the brand’s entire strategy. This is as the searcher’s intent is a digital marketing campaign, not a digital marketing strategy. I bet the post would have performed even better if I had done that. But we’ll get into searcher intent a little later.

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Key Takeaway

Is the information you provide up to date with the current trends in your industry? This includes not only quotes and statistics but also examples that you use.

2. Add actionable advice/cut irrelevant detail

How often have you read a post that vaguely describes what you should do and lacks examples or the action steps needed to execute the advice?

On the other hand, have you ever read a post that has the answer to your question somewhere in it? But then there is so much unnecessary information that you can’t find what you want.

Both are equally problematic and, unfortunately, common in content marketing.

First, let’s discuss posts that lack depth. Unfortunately, there is no specific metric you can check to see if the content has depth. Though, there are a few signals that can clue you in, including:

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  • Few to zero examples.
  • A significantly shorter word count than what’s ranking.
  • Generic tips with no actionable information.

You can also use content optimization tools like Clearscope, which shows the subheadings that commonly appear in other top-ranking posts. While I recommend that you take these keyword tools with a grain of salt (don’t try to sprinkle in all of the keywords), they can help you uncover topics you may have overlooked.

For example, if you’re writing a guide to “medical SEO,” the tool may show that the word “backlinking” is commonly used in other posts. Given that backlinking is a key element of SEO, this is a helpful insight because you’ll definitely want to create a section on that topic.

Beyond this, the best advice I can give you is to put yourself in your target audience’s shoes (ideally, you’ve already done extensive market research and talked to several customers).

Ask yourself: If they read this content, could they implement the advice given and see results?

To drive this home, let’s look at an example where the post lacked depth. This post, “13 Ways to Market Your Business Online,” is the very first post I ever updated. It was originally just 930 words long and drove between 30 and 50 monthly visits. The final product is 1,700 words. It now drives over 600 monthly visits.

Line graph of organic traffic

However, I didn’t just decide to make it longer to accomplish this. Instead, I added relevant, actionable advice to support my argument.

For example, in the excerpt below, you can see that I supported my argument (building a brand is important) with a quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt. I also added an actionable tip to make the tip less vague.

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Excerpt of blog post that includes quote and actionable tip

Everything highlighted was added or changed when updating the post.

That said, adding more depth isn’t always the best solution, as it can make content unnecessarily long-winded.

For example, let’s say you’re writing a post on “how to change a tire.” In this case, the reader really doesn’t want a 2,000-word guide—they just want to change their tire as quickly as possible!

So instead of writing about the mechanics of changing a tire and statistics on how many people know how to change tires, just give the reader the steps they need to change the tire.

While that may be a rather obvious case, I see this all the time when I update content (especially if it’s an ultimate guide). For example, here’s the table of contents of a post I’m preparing to update:

Table of contents

As you can see, the content is too long and repetitive. For one, it talks about the ROI of influencer marketing twice. Sure, it’s an ultimate guide. But even those reading an ultimate guide only want to consume the necessities to get them on their way.

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Another example of how this content is too long-winded is in chapters 2 and 7, where both discuss tactics on reaching out to an influencer. Sure, they discuss slightly different tactics. But I’d rather read one concise section on the 80/20 of influencer outreach than several sections containing every possible way you could reach out to an influencer.

Key Takeaway

When you’re writing, include the 80/20 action steps your reader needs to know, along with examples (hypothetical or real) to prove your point. However, don’t write any more than that. The reader doesn’t necessarily need to know every single possible way to do something or the exact science behind every topic. Get to the point.

3. Improve the user experience

Google has always stressed the importance of optimizing for user experience. Much of this takes place at the site level (HTTPS, page speed, etc.). But there are things you can do to improve content on a post-by-post basis.

First, if your post is particularly long, consider adding a sticky table of contents to help the reader find exactly what they are looking for.

Excerpt of Ahrefs' link building blog post; clickable ToC on the left

Second, pay a designer to create attractive, branded graphics. This will go a long way in both keeping users on your page and establishing your blog as an authority.

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Third, break up your paragraphs (ideally none longer than three to four sentences) and use bullets to keep the reader’s attention. Remember that most people are looking for fast answers and are, therefore, skimming. So contrary to popular belief, making your content skimmable will actually increase the time readers spend on your page.

As simple as these things may sound, they’re super effective in my experience.

Key Takeaway

Don’t discount the importance of a blog post that is clean and easy to read. Sometimes, long blog posts are too frustrating for users, so be sure to format your blog posts appropriately and hire a designer to help you.

4. Fulfill the searcher’s intent

Search intent is basically the reason behind the search. Does the searcher want to learn something or buy something? Are they looking for a detailed guide or skimmable listicle? Do they just want a quick answer or lots of knowledge?

If you fail to understand the answers to these questions, you’ll be at risk of misaligning your content with search intent. Consequently, it’ll be much harder (sometimes impossible) to rank the content.

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This is quite a complex topic, as there are many ways you may misalign content with search intent. But here are three of the main ways I’ve noticed:

A. Post style is incorrect

Before you write your blog post, Google the main keyword to better understand what kind of blog post the reader wants.

For example, if you’re about to write a how-to guide for a term like “best CRM for small businesses,” you’re wasting your time because the searcher’s intent is clearly a simple list of tools:

Google SERP for "best crm for small business"

In this case, they don’t want to read a guide about it. They just want to see some solutions!

If you notice that your blog post is in the wrong format for that keyword, you’ll probably have to rewrite it altogether.

B. You have too much information irrelevant to the reader’s pain points

Another issue I often find when updating content is there are sections of content that just aren’t relevant to the reader’s pain points.

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For example, a post on “content marketing KPIs” shouldn’t have a header with the words “what is content marketing.”

While that’s a rather extreme example, I often see subtler cases.

For example, I recently updated a post targeting the keyword “examples of storytelling marketing.” When I looked at the search results for the term, all of them were list posts that had introductions around 100–200 words. The post then dove into examples.

However, when I looked at the post I was updating, there were several sections before the “examples” section that totaled 1,800 words. In fact, here is what the post’s structure looked like:

  • What is storytelling?
  • Science behind storytelling
  • Why is storytelling important for marketing?
  • Five principles of storytelling 
    • Principle 1
    • Principle 2
    • Principle 3
    • Principle 4
    • Principle 5
  • (Finally!) Example 1

In this case, the searcher’s intent is a list of examples. So if the searcher has to scroll past 1,800 words to read what they want, they’ll likely leave. This behavior is a signal to Google that your content isn’t very good.

To update it, I cut that intro and added a few extra relevant examples (most of the other posts had 11–12, so I made the post fit that range). As of this writing (a few weeks after my updates), the post is ranking second for “examples of storytelling marketing.”

Here’s a screenshot of its traffic trajectory:

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Line graph of organic traffic

C. You aren’t speaking at the reader’s knowledge level

Finally, there are plenty of blog posts that miss the search intent because they speak above or below the reader’s knowledge level. Hence, they’re deaf to the reader’s pain points and desires.

Let’s walk through an example.

Imagine you are selling a SaaS marketing tool to content marketing managers, and the keyword you’re targeting is “content marketing KPIs.”

Here’s an example of an introduction that is below their level:

Content marketing is a great way to increase your traffic and generate more leads for your business. In fact, anyone that performs a Google search is looking for blogs like yours to provide the answer to their questions. However, some content is more effective than others. Therefore, to make sure that your content is on track, you need to measure KPIs (key performance indicators).

This is inappropriate for two reasons:

  1. Content managers already understand the value of content marketing, so explaining that is redundant.
  2. Given that they are searching for KPIs, there’s no need to explain why they need KPIs. They were already convinced before they landed on your post.

In contrast, here’s a much better introduction for the very same keyword and scenario:

Tracking the performance of content marketing campaigns is tricky as the ROI often takes months or even years to realize. Therefore, most people measure their content strategy’s success by the traffic it’s generating.

While traffic can correlate with better business results, this isn’t always the case. For example, you may be driving traffic that isn’t ready to buy or from a parallel industry.

Therefore, traffic shouldn’t be your only measure of success. Instead, this post will detail which KPIs you should measure to ensure your content is driving an ROI and how to track them.

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Notice the introduction above also speaks to a more experienced audience (content marketing managers). It touches on their pain points and relates to how they are (most likely) already tracking content marketing. Now, it’s probable they’ll keep reading.

However, the issue of speaking above or below an audience’s level doesn’t just apply to introductions. As you’re updating the content, ask yourself if each paragraph resonates with the audience’s pain points.

Recommended reading: Searcher Intent: The Overlooked ‘Ranking Factor’ You Should Be Optimizing For

Key Takeaway

First, Google your keyword before you start writing to make sure you are using the right blog post structure (how-to, listicle, etc.). Then ask yourself if each section within the post is relevant to the searcher’s pain points. Finally, ask yourself if the writing is at the searcher’s knowledge level.

5. Make final optimizations

Now that you’ve done the hard part of actually updating the blog post, make sure that you do these last few optimizations, as they can mean the difference between a 2X and 10X ROI.

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First, take a look at your average click-through rate (CTR) in Google Search Console. According to a study done by Databox, a good organic CTR is 3%-5%. Therefore, if your post isn’t hitting that benchmark, consider updating your title tag and meta description.

If you really want to improve your organic CTR, you can also use a tool like ClickFlow to run A/B tests on your title tags and meta descriptions.

Another easy way to improve your refreshed content’s performance is by building internal links to it from other posts that are relevant and powerful (have plenty of external links from high-quality sources).

If you have the resources, building external links to your refreshed content is also a great strategy. While most outreach tactics are overused, here’s one to consider: offering to update the content for the people whom you’re reaching out to (instead of just offering a guest post).

Here’s an exact pitch I’ve used before with success:

Hi Sam,

I read your post about the best marketing agency tools for 2022 and just signed up for [Service] based on the post. So thanks for the rec!

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However, I noticed that some of the recommendations are a little dated.

For example, you recommend [Tool A], but I’ve found that there are now cheaper tools like [Tool B] and [Tool C], which do essentially the same thing.

I also think that if you had 10 tools rather than 5 tools, the post might rank higher. Would you like me to update it for you for free? I’d also love to include a (non-promotional) section on our analytics tool, which a lot of agencies use.

If you don’t love my new version, no pressure to post it.

Thanks,
Megan

You don’t have to use this exact template. But hopefully, this can get you started. If you have examples of posts you’ve updated that later performed better, you may want to include that somewhere in the pitch.

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Key Takeaway

Once you’ve updated your post, the last few optimizations include improving your title tag and meta description to drive more clicks, adding a few relevant internal links to the post, and building some external links to the post (if you have the resources).

Final thoughts

Content refreshing is still an underused tactic that a lot of blogs can benefit from. If you tried it before and it didn’t work, there could be another underlying issue, e.g., a poor user experience, an irrelevant section in the beginning, or a poor search intent match.

At the end of the day, not every blog post will perform better. Sometimes, search engines just don’t approve of certain posts. But if you make refreshing content a priority, follow the steps above, and add the updated content to your editorial calendar, you’ll have some posts that’ll take off post-update. This more than makes up for all of the time invested in posts that didn’t succeed.

Got 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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