Connect with us

SEO

Chrome Canary Features For Technical SEO

Published

on

Chrome Canary Features For Technical SEO

Building for the web is harder than ever. Better mobile technologies and web standards roll out every day.

So, how are websites keeping up?

Unlimited data plans are a luxury. But how much data gets downloaded when visiting a website, and what’s the environmental impact of our web today?

Google search engine’s mobile-first index prioritizes websites that deliver buttery-smooth page experiences. Does your business ship with search discoverability in mind?

Developers have a lot of influence on how successful a site’s performance is on Google – but do they always focus on search?

Advertisement

Good developers strike a balance between aesthetics and website performance. Is your team setting web performance budgets with measurable goals?

In this piece, I explore ways to improve communication with your dev team. Chrome’s Developer Tools have the data that devs need to fix issues faster.

We’ll see how the Canary browser is a great place to start a technical SEO audit.

I’ll share new feature updates SEO pros should be testing today.

How Chrome Releases New Features

Canary is the early-release version of Google Chrome.

Google releases its features in four stages it calls release channels. The channels are Canary, Dev, Beta, and Stable. Chrome Canary, Beta, and Dev can install side-by-side on Android, Mac, Windows, and Linux.

Advertisement

Chrome engineers test new features on real users to see if they run into any issues before releasing the feature to the next channel.

Screenshot from YouTube, Aug 2022Google Chrome Developers Chrome Release Channels Staged Rollouts Youtube Screenshot

Canary gets the updates first with nightly releases at 2 AM PST. You get the latest features, browser experiments, and web platform APIs. Updates also include bug fixes, browser improvements, code clean-up, safety, and security.

Features get iterated on over a six-week release cycle before going live to all 3.2B users.

Users get to test upcoming features on their websites, web apps, content management system (CMS), themes, and plugins. They report bugs and give feedback on new features.

Not all features make it past Canary. The experimental browser is used by browser enthusiasts, developers, enterprise users, and technical SEO pros.

Debugging SEO With Developer Tools

Chrome DevTools is a diagnostic browser toolkit for testing websites inside the browser. Developers test, build and maintain websites with instruments that measure page speed performance.

Browser tools test website performance in different conditions. It gives you a head start on getting websites fixed.

Advertisement

For devs, the tools are almost as important as the browser itself.

No need to wait for a long and expensive crawl to finish; You can find technical SEO issues and file them right away with Canary.

Setting Up Chrome Canary For SEO

Websites need to perform well across different locations, devices, and networks. DevTools let you simulate browsing at different places and at slower speeds.

Set Canary up to browse as the Googlebot user agent in Chrome’s settings.

Take a look at what Google sees when it loads a site.

google chrome developers chrome canary setup devtools network conditions screenshotScreenshot from Chrome DevTools Network Conditions Panel, December 2022google chrome developers chrome canary setup devtools network conditions screenshot

Don’t let browser extensions interfere with the accuracy of your tests.

Download Canary as a separate browser dedicated to technical SEO auditing and debugging.

Advertisement

Plug And Scan Technical SEO Troubleshooting In Canary

Chrome DevTools lets you look under the hood of a website.

It tests and prints detailed performance reports in seconds – but it can overwhelm you at first.

Technical SEO pros inspect the web in the same way that mechanics troubleshoot cars; We plug and scan sites into browser tools and analyze how they load and respond.

With Canary you can record and measure key moments like page loading, navigating, and user interactions. You can also get status codes, Core Web Vitals (CWV) readings, waterfall and timeline charts, and much more.

Google chrome developers chrome devtools lcp performance youtube screenshotScreenshot from YouTube, May 2021Google chrome developers chrome devtools lcp performance youtube screenshot

Sometimes troubleshooting in Canary only points toward a symptom instead of the problem. More capable tools offer advanced readings, yet the troubleshooting process remains the same.

Technical SEO Auditing With Google Chrome Canary

Google wants websites to load fast, but a page won’t rank well if Googlebot doesn’t understand the main content.

DevTools can measure and help debug website delivery and performance.

Advertisement

Audit and debug Javascript, CSS, and CWV issues with Canary.

Use DevTools to check your pages and templates right away.

google-chrome-developers chrome devtools cwv metrics youtube screenshotScreenshot from YouTube, May 2022google-chrome-developers chrome devtools cwv metrics youtube screenshot

It helps to see how a site is guiding visitors and Google’s crawlers. Check for internal links, content duplication, broken links, missing images, and 404 pages.

Check your on-page metadata to see if it’s all there and optimized. Look for structured data problems, and investigate content Google didn’t index because of JavaScript rendering problems.

Throttle network settings to examine latency across different web conditions, and analyze the website run time performance to identify bottlenecks.

Look for opportunities to optimize your content delivery.

Check how a site’s resources load and render. Not all resources are equal – better resource delivery can improve the user experience.

Advertisement

Using DevTools In Canary For Technical SEO Website Audits

The following are some of the popular use cases in DevTools for SEO pros:

Lighthouse

  • A score-based audit of performance, accessibility, best practices, SEO, and PWA.
  • Actionable insights to improve performance.

Network Panel

  • Search engine crawler emulation.
  • Network condition and speed simulation.
  • Network requests and connections information per frame.
  • Resource loading and rendering information.
  • Waterfall chart visual of website resources as they download.
  • Server responses.

Performance Panel

Other SEO DevTools Workflows

  • Disabling JS setting to debug Javascript SEO issues.
  • Mobile device testing.
  • Accessibility Checks.
  • Remote Headless Browser Testing.
  • Programmatic DevTools browser testing and automation.

Do You Need Help Making A Business Case For SEO?

Use data to prove the value of technical SEO.

Benchmark site performance and compare the content delivery against your competitors.

Competitor benchmarking LCP CRUX field dataScreenshot from Looker Studio, December 2022Competitor benchmarking LCP CRUX field data

Use Canary to keep up with your site as it changes.

Chrome Browser Development Ecosystem

Chrome’s software development strategy runs several rolling and side-by-side deployments. This method lets it run A/B and capacity testing.

Chrome’s engineers automate feature rollbacks and avoid cold starts, and downtimes. It’s a simplified process that gives granular browser version control.

Make sure to track features as they evolve across each channel. Read feature abstracts and understand what business problems they can solve.

Advertisement

Join the conversation.

Chromestatus.com tracks features as they progress. Subscribe to the Chrome Developer’s blog to keep up to date with the Chrome tools and libraries.

Chrome platform status screenshotScreenshot from ChromeStatus.com, December 2022Chrome platform status screenshot

Experimental DevTools Features In Chrome Canary

New Performance Insights Panel In Chrome DevTools

Professional athletes watch gameplay films to understand their performance. In a similar vein, the Performance Insights panel lets you playback and share recordings of a webpage load.

chrome dev tools performance panel screenshot mobile device viewChrome DevTools Performance Panel, Dec 2022chrome dev tools performance panel screenshot mobile device view

The new panel shipped with Chrome 102. It’s a streamlined update of the Performance panel which gives insights without requiring a deep technical understanding of browser rendering.

The panel has a simple UI for measuring page load CWV performance. It gives actionable page insights, finds render-blocking requests, layout shifts, and more.

Future releases will expand use cases like testing interactivity.

new performance insights panel screenshot mobile device view

new performance insights panel screenshot mobile device view

Share network delays in your critical rendering path, and show GPU Activity for dropped frames that cause your site to lag.

Save your devs some time and attach Performance recordings when submitting tickets. Show them exactly what’s wrong with your pages to inspire action right away.

Advertisement

New Recorder Panel Updates In Chrome DevTools

The Recorder panel is an experimental feature that gives user flow insights.

It records runtime performance for multi-step user flows via the Performance Panel.

Use this feature to audit your primary website user flows performance.

Most users interact with your site after it loads. So, it’s a good idea to record user interactions like clicking, scrolling, and navigating. Record and edit your user flows for simulated network conditions.

Also, record an eCommerce checkout flow, and measure checkout performance by setting up different add-to-cart steps.

You can also script a page load and button or link click interaction and measure its CWV.

Advertisement
new-recorder-checkout flow amazon screenshot desktop viewScreenshot from Chrome DevTools Recorder Panel, Dec 2022new-recorder-checkout flow amazon screenshot desktop view

Google lists support for several user input properties.

It auto-detects ARIA and CSS selectors. You can also add custom data-* selectors used by popular JS and CSS frameworks. The latest Chrome 108 release expanded support to XPath and text selectors.

Pages can load fast but run slowly – and a poor user experience has an impact on the perception of your brand.

Make sure visitors aren’t abandoning a site because it froze when they clicked around.

Exporting Recorder Panel Scripts For Third-Party Playback

Export your main user-flow recordings into different formats for popular front-end testing tools.

Use the JSON exports to edit flows and import them back into Recorder and watch replays.

Advertisement

Export custom scripts with Chrome extensions.

Support exists for exporting recordings into Google’s Node.js Puppeteer library. You can also use them with Cypress, Nightwatch, Sauce Labs, and TestCafe.

google chrome developers chrome devtools new recorder panel export youtube screenshotScreenshot from Chrome DevTools Recorder Panel, December 2022google chrome developers chrome devtools new recorder panel export youtube screenshot

Automate Headless Browser Testing With Puppeteer

Headless browsing is when you visit a website without the browser’s UI. You can launch Chrome in your computer’s background and operate browser tools.

Puppeteer Chrome is an API that runs over the DevTools protocol. Puppeteer can also run browser tests without using the Chrome UI via headless mode.

Set up automatic periodic CWV testing, and grab screenshots of your pages loading on different devices and networks. Devs automate form submissions and UI testing.

Automate your page speed performance reporting.

Chrome lets you work smarter, not harder. Devs save a lot of time, and so can you when performing technical SEO audits with Canary.

Advertisement

Automate Timeline Traces For Synthetic Testing

Synthetic tests are timeline trace recordings from different browsers, devices, and networks.

Synthetic simulates performance testing for your user’s real-world experience.

Set up user flow recordings in the Recorder Panel and export the script into a WebPage test. You can export custom Recorder scripts via the WebPage Test Recorder extension.

Web Platform API Testing On Chrome Canary

The Chrome engineering team publishes experimental APIs.

Third-party tools and businesses depend on them for testing new features. Origin Trials are like Feature Flags – they toggle off and don’t always make it to Stable Chrome.

The feature proposal documentation gives context and explains how they can help users.

Advertisement

Check the status of Chrome Feature Flags and APIs on chromestatus.com.

google chrome developers chrome variations telemetry metrics youtube screenshotScreenshot from YouTube, August 2022google chrome developers chrome variations telemetry metrics youtube screenshot

Developers use APIs for automated web performance testing. Real User Monitoring (RUM) analytics providers use Chrome’s APIs to track and report real users’ CWVs.

Chrome is built on the Chromium open-source project and bugs are tracked on the Chromium bug tracker.

Back/Forward Cache Testing For Smooth Page Navigation

Modern browsers recently added a feature that loads pages faster using a new type of cache.

The Back/Forward (bfcache) cache captures a snapshot of the page in the browser’s memory when you visit.

bfcache test devtools screenshot amazonScreenshot from Chrome DevTools bfcache test, December 2022bfcache test devtools screenshot amazon

It reloads pages without making a new network request to your server.

Users that navigate back to a previously visited page on your site get a quicker page load experience. Loading from the bfcache is faster than the traditional HTTP cache, as it saves your visitor from downloading extra data.

Chrome 96 Stable release shipped the bfcache test in the Application panel. It checks pages if the Back/Forward caching is being deployed.

Advertisement

Fixing Analytics Underreporting From Bfcache Browser Feature

The bfcache browser optimization is automatic, but it does impact CWV. Analytics tools may underreport pageviews because a page gets loaded from its bfcache.

Is your analytics set up to detect when a page gets loaded from bfcache?

Test your website for bfcache to make sure your important pages are serving it.

Keep an eye on when your pages no longer serve from the bfcache.

New Update To The Back/Forward Cache Testing API

The new NotRestoredReason API feature improves error reporting for bfcache issues. It helps understand why a page isn’t serving the cache to returning visitors.

The API will ship with Stable Chrome 111.

Advertisement

Identifying Render Blocking Resources With The Performance API

RUM tools did not have a simple way to check if a resource was blocking rendering.

Chrome 107 shipped a new feature for the Performance API that identifies render-blocking resources. This update helps RUM users save time and optimize rendering paths.

The Performance Panel helps identify render-blocking resources like CSS, which delay the loading of a site.

When a browser comes across a stylesheet it holds page loading up until it finishes reading the file. A browser needs to understand the layout and design of a page before it can render and paint a website.

Devs can help minimize re-calculation, styling, and repainting to prevent website slowdowns.

Improved HTTP Response Status Codes Reporting For The Resource Timing API

The Resource Timing API did not support failed response code reporting. Chrome 109 will be shipping with a new feature for the Performance API that captures HTTP response codes.

Advertisement

Developers and SEOs can now segment their RUM analytics for page visits that result in 4XX and 5XX response codes.

Chromestatus http response status code in resource timing feature

Chromestatus http response status code in resource timing feature

The Future Of Core Web Vitals Is Here

Google owns 86% of the search engine market share, and Chrome commands 66% of the global browser market share.

Google launched its web performance Core Web Vitals (CWV) metrics in 2020 to help quantify the user experience on a webpage.

First Input Delay (FID) is a CWV that measures a page’s interactivity.

Since it was first launched as a metric, people have been improving the FID of their websites – and today, they are crushing it. 92% of websites now have a good FID score for mobile users, and 100% for desktop users.

But FID only tests for the first user interaction. It does not measure the user experience beyond the initial page load.

Advertisement

According to Jeremey Wagner,

“Chrome usage shows that 90% of a user’s activity happens after the initial page load.”

Google recently launched the experimental Interaction to Next Paint (INP) metric at Google I/O 2022 – and it could soon replace FID as the CWV interactivity field metric.

INP paints a more accurate picture of the interactive user experience. It captures clicking, tapping, keyboard, and scrolled tabbing activity, and also measures the page’s average response time for any interaction that occurs.

js conf korea jeremy Wagner intreraction to next paint youtube screenshotScreenshot from YouTube, November 2022js conf korea jeremy Wagner intreraction to next paint youtube screenshot

The HTTP Archive reported a stronger Total Blocking Time (TBT) correlation with INP over FID.

Google continues to experiment on and refine INP.

INP-optimized sites will have a competitive advantage when Google evolves past FID.

Is your website ready for when INP becomes a CWV and affects ranking?

Advertisement

Closing Thoughts On Using Chrome Canary For SEO

In order to perform well and score high on usability, a site must look, feel, navigate, and load fast – and also be accessible. Delightful design and fast browsing allow for better visibility on search.

We’re seeing better-looking websites now, but it can sometimes come at the cost of a good user experience. Dev teams need to consider the environmental cost of shipping bloated websites.

A website loads the way our developers build them.

Devs have to take into account design, content, performance, accessibility, frameworks, networks, and devices. They need to build sites while balancing priorities from marketing, management, and SEO.

SEO pros and devs can work together to drive better website performance. Google’s out-of-the-box tooling offers a great starting point for technical SEO auditing.

DevTools helps cut down time on debugging and troubleshooting, while Canary lets you streamline CWV reporting with browser automation.

Advertisement

Find and share the data your devs need to get started fixing SEO issues right away.

More resources: 


Featured Image: Studio Cantath/Shutterstock

var s_trigger_pixel_load = false;
function s_trigger_pixel(){
if( !s_trigger_pixel_load ){
setTimeout(function(){ striggerEvent( ‘load2’ ); }, 500);
window.removeEventListener(“scroll”, s_trigger_pixel, false );
window.removeEventListener(“mousemove”, s_trigger_pixel, false );
window.removeEventListener(“click”, s_trigger_pixel, false );
console.log(‘s_trigger_pixel’);
}
s_trigger_pixel_load = true;
}
window.addEventListener( ‘scroll’, s_trigger_pixel, false);
document.addEventListener( ‘mousemove’, s_trigger_pixel, false);
document.addEventListener( ‘click’, s_trigger_pixel, false);

window.addEventListener( ‘load2’, function() {

if( sopp != ‘yes’ && addtl_consent != ‘1~’ && !ss_u ){

Advertisement

!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s)
{if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod?
n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};
if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;
n.queue=[];t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;
t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)[0];
s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window,document,’script’,
‘https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);

if( typeof sopp !== “undefined” && sopp === ‘yes’ ){
fbq(‘dataProcessingOptions’, [‘LDU’], 1, 1000);
}else{
fbq(‘dataProcessingOptions’, []);
}

fbq(‘init’, ‘1321385257908563’);

fbq(‘track’, ‘PageView’);

fbq(‘trackSingle’, ‘1321385257908563’, ‘ViewContent’, {
content_name: ‘chrome-canary-features-for-technical-seo’,
content_category: ‘technical-seo web-development’
});
}
});

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

SEO

How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

Published

on

By

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.

Advertisement

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:

Advertisement

“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:

Advertisement

“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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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:

Advertisement
  • 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

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

New Google Trends SEO Documentation

Published

on

By

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.

Advertisement

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

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Published

on

All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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

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

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

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

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

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

Advertisement

GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

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

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

Advertisement

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



Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending