SEO
Headless SEO Explained + 6 Best Practices
Put simply, a headless content management system (CMS) separates a website’s content from its design and code.
It functions differently from a traditional CMS, like WordPress, and therefore requires different considerations for SEO as well. While general SEO best practices and rules remain the same, how you go about implementing them will differ in a headless setup.
This is a beginner-friendly guide covering everything you need to know about headless CMS SEO, including:
- How headless SEO is different from regular SEO
- The benefits of using a headless CMS
- Headless SEO best practices
But first, let’s make sure we’re on the same page about the ins and outs of what a headless CMS is and how its differences may affect your SEO strategy.
In a traditional CMS, all your content, code, and design live in one place. While you can design a responsive layout for some devices, the content cannot be displayed separately from the website itself.
Like a pizza, you can’t easily separate all the ingredients. It’s an all-or-nothing deal.
A headless CMS, however, separates your content, code, and design so you can create content once and distribute it across different channels and devices easily.
For example, a headless eCommerce site can pull its pricing and inventory from two different systems and then push these to the website or other applications independently of any other content.
A headless CMS allows your content distribution to be greater than the sum of its parts in a way that a traditional CMS never will be able to achieve.
For example, when you build a webpage using a traditional CMS, you’ll often use a visual drag-and-drop editor that looks a bit like this:
How you enter content and images here will closely represent what your website visitors see.
Now, let’s say you want to distribute the content you’ve added here through a different device or channel, like a VR headset or an electronic billboard.
With a traditional website CMS, you simply can’t do that. You would need to recreate your content and adapt it to the platform you’re delivering it on.
But, with a headless CMS, you don’t have such a limitation. That’s because how you organize and arrange your content within the CMS is completely different. It looks a bit like this:
Instead of adding content and images based on how you want it to look, you simply enter the content as a collection of separate “ingredients.” These ingredients can then be dynamically distributed and designed to match the needs of each different channel and device.
Headless SEO is the practice of optimizing your headless CMS so that it meets search engine optimization best practices and gives your content the best chance of ranking for relevant keywords.
Since content can be distributed across other channels, beyond the website, headless SEO offers a more flexible approach towards optimizing content no matter where it’s viewed.
If the tagline for a headless CMS is “create content once, distribute it everywhere,” then the tagline for headless SEO would be “optimize everything, everywhere, all at once.”
There are a few key differences between doing SEO for a headless CMS vs traditional SEO.
1. You’ll have greater control and flexibility
Have you ever wanted to customize some element of your technical SEO setup but found that a CMS wouldn’t let you? Yeah, it’s a common gripe and happens more frequently than SEO pros would like.
With headless SEO, you get to custom-design your CMS to be exactly how you want it to be.
- Want a specific SEO-friendly URL structure? Easy peasy!
- Want a custom robots.txt or sitemap file? Coming right up!
- Want specific schema templates for different types of content? You got it!
It is (quite literally) a case of “ask and you shall receive.”
Any optimization that you can dream of, a headless CMS can achieve, but only if you ask your developer to create it and guide them on how you want it done.
The caveat with this is that you’ll be 100% responsible for everything to do with your SEO setup. You’ll need to think about things you may not normally have to worry about when using a traditional CMS, like:
- Adding validation rules to prevent mistakes
- Adding customized logic to canonicals
- Architecting faceted navigation systems
- Defining pagination preferences
- And more
Tip
You can use Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool to get a list of over 170 technical SEO issues to educate your devs about so they don’t accidentally make mistakes with your headless SEO implementation.
Make sure to schedule automated audits so you can monitor these issues over time. If you’re unsure how to direct your developers to fix any of them, click the “?” next to each issue to see a description and some advice.
2. You’ll need to optimize content, code & design separately
Perhaps the most difficult thing to adapt to with headless SEO is that you’ll need to optimize content, code, and design independently of each other.
- Content Optimization: Mainly occurs through a process called “content modeling.” Content models break your content down into various file formats and blocks which can be optimized individually. More on this in a moment.
- Technical Optimization: Technical SEO is implemented separately from on-page. Writers can upload content without bogging down page speed or other performance metrics. And, developers can deploy updates without halting publishing activities (unlike with some traditional CMS’).
- Design Optimization: Instead of trying to squeeze technical and SEO requirements into your design process, you can focus 100% on designing optimal user experiences for each device and channel that your content will appear on.
There’s a lot more planning and architecting involved when it comes to headless SEO and you’ll need to work closely with developers to make sure your optimizations are implemented as you want them to be.
3. You need to create and optimize content models instead of pages
If you’re used to using a CMS like WordPress, then you’re also used to optimizing complete pages and posts for the most part.
But with a headless CMS, you’ll need to build and optimize content models instead of pages. What’s a content model you ask?
Content modeling structures and organizes your content in a way that APIs can then distribute to any kind of interface. Not only can you define the attributes each type of content will feature, but you can also create relationships between different types of content.
Think of a content model as the recipe needed to instruct your code on where it should send various types of content.
Like any good recipe, a content model will gather the correct ingredients (your content blocks) and organize them in a way that will deliver a specific outcome (a complete piece of content adapted to the interface it’s displayed on).
Without a recipe, you end up with an “everything” pizza that combines all ingredients, always—even if it doesn’t make sense to include them. For instance, on WordPress, the mobile, tablet, and desktop views of a website are all different slices of the “everything” pizza, but on a headless CMS, they’re entirely different meals.
The great thing about content modeling for SEO is that you can create a field or attribute for absolutely anything you want.
For example, if you have a real estate business, then you’ll need to include property listings and information about your agents in your content model. And, you’ll need to consider all the attributes you’ll need for each of these types of content.
Here’s an example of what that may look, like:
Things like the “property title” or the “agent’s name” are the attributes that fit each type of content best. You’ll need to think about all the attributes needed for every content type you add to your headless CMS.
Now, just because you have two different types of content, it doesn’t mean they can’t show on the same page. They can indeed.
Notice how the property listing includes a reference to the agent managing that property? This reference connects the two different content types to each other and allows every property listing to display information about the relevant agent.
When it comes to headless SEO, you’ll need to include a similar sort of reference for content types that require SEO metadata or particular types of schema markup, like so:
Doing this allows your website to include all the relevant on-page optimizations you need. But then you can also choose not to load this metadata for platforms and channels where SEO is not a priority, like in a mobile app.
Here are the biggest ones:
- Publish content across channels more easily, reaching more people in the process
- Lighter and more versatile website
- Remove bottlenecks between dev and content teams
For example, at Ahrefs, we use a headless framework to show content about Google algorithm updates in two places: the organic traffic chart in Site Explorer…
… and our page listing Google algorithm updates (that anyone can view):
Each time a new Google update is released, we simply add information about it in our headless CMS and it gets pushed to both locations. Even better, as there’s no need to involve developers, our content team can move fast and keep everything updated with ease.
But we’re not the only ones benefitting from a headless approach. My buddy Dion Lovrecich at Extra Strength (a marketing agency here in Australia) recently implemented it for a client and had this to say:
Deploying headless SEO took our client’s content process from an internal fiasco to big productivity wins.
Until we moved to headless, the engineering team would halt any front-end work when content was being updated. This is no longer required.
We’re also able to more easily adapt and update content (very important in the fast-moving legal landscape), segment SEO requirements for different types of content formats (like blogs, videos, and images), and publish relevant content faster—all thanks to headless approach.
Despite the many benefits that headless systems offer, there are also some disadvantages to consider.
For example, these systems are more complex than traditional CMS solutions. They require a lot of resources to build and maintain. It’s also difficult for non-technical teams to get started with headless due to the integrative nature and the various APIs that may need to be connected.
Even with developer support, you’ll need a greater technical skill set so you can brief developers correctly and minimize mistakes in your headless SEO setup.
These limitations make it challenging for smaller businesses and non-technical teams to successfully work in a headless environment. That being said, there are many emerging solutions that make headless sites easier to build and optimize and it’s likely we’ll see smaller organizations begin to adopt such technologies in the future.
Headless SEO best practices typically follow the same rules as any SEO strategy. You should still create valuable content that meets search intent, deliver optimal user experiences, and ensure search engines are crawling a lean, optimized website.
However, headless SEO also requires a greater degree of competency and knowledge when it comes to some technical and on-page SEO implementations which we’ve outlined for you below.
1. Brief your devs on technical SEO best practices
This may sound boring but you really can’t succeed with headless SEO unless your devs understand what they need to implement. And that comes down to how well you communicate with them.
For example, instead of instructing them to simply “add a sitemap,” get specific. “I need an XML sitemap that updates dynamically on a daily basis and only includes indexable, canonical URLs with a 200 status code.”
Then, you can leverage Ahrefs’ Site Audit to keep track of how developers are implementing your requests. Set up a regular audit schedule so you can keep tabs on critical errors across a list of over 170 technical issues.
For example, here are all the ones for sitemaps that you can use to audit the implementation of the above instructions:
2. Use keyword insights to create your content models
The best place to start content modeling is by doing keyword research. Not only can you uncover the dominant search intents your content will need to meet, you can also get really cool insights on attributes to include in your content models.
For example, let’s say you’re a real estate agent in New York. Using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, you see that there are a number of specific, medium- to long-tail keywords people search for:
From these, we can:
- Infer search intent, like if people want to buy or rent.
- Discover attributes people care most about, like the number of bedrooms or a lakefront location.
- Map out suburbs with a lot of interest, like Rochester or Charlton.
- Consider categories for different property types, like apartments or commercial properties.
With these insights, we can then create the following in our content model:
- Categories based on a purchase or rental intent
- Property listings with meaningful attributes included
- Categories and tags based on location or property types
- A dynamic map with filters for specific attributes
And this is just a starting point! The possibilities headless SEO provides are endlessly customizable and using keyword data will help you hone in on what matters most to your audience.
3. Map out your taxonomies like tags and categories
Taxonomies help name, describe, and classify your content so you can easily find it and so it appears dynamically in the right places.
When it comes to headless SEO, you will need to create a detailed plan so the right content shows up at the right time and is optimized correctly for the device or channel it’s being viewed on.
Tags and categories are common examples of taxonomy structures you can use to organize your content.
For example, a real estate agent might create categories based on:
- Location: e.g., New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco
- Property types: e.g., Apartment, house, villa, multi-plex
- Intent: To buy, to rent, to sell
Furthermore, you can create tags that align with the attributes of each property.
Instead of simply tagging a page or post, however, you’ll be tagging all content types in your headless CMS. This means you may need to consider taxonomies that won’t display on the front-end view layer.
For instance, you can categorize your content based on things like the type of file it is (image, video, text) or the device it’s best viewed on (mobile, desktop, VR headset).
4. Add separate fields for schema markup
Schema markup helps search engines better understand content. Many search engines use schema markup to enhance the interface and display content in a more visually rich manner.
The great thing about headless SEO is that your content models can easily be converted into rich schema markup.
For example, if you create a content type for your real estate agents, you can align the attributes with those required for detailed person schema. Then, schema can be created programmatically and included everywhere those fields display (even if they’re not on your website).
You can also request that your devs create a field for inputting custom schema instead. This can be done for each URL or for each content component in your content mode, and you can set rules for delivering it in a single script on the front end.
5. Think about heading hierarchy and integrate it into your model
Heading hierarchy relates to the relationship between main headings and sub-headings in your content. There are SEO and accessibility best practices that are best for your content to abide by, but with a headless CMS, it can be difficult to track the heading hierarchy for each page.
As a standard rule, only use one H1 tag and reserve it for the main title of the page. You can do this in the view layer of the website by denoting the field for the main title to be tagged as a H1 in the HTML code.
You can default to H2 or H3 headings for the remaining sub-headings. However, it is important your designers only allocate heading tags to content that is part of the main body.
Designers can often add heading tags for things they want to look visually similar, even if those elements aren’t part of the main content, so make sure you instruct them not to get carried away!
6. Use references for internal links
When it comes to internal links in a headless SEO strategy, consider adding references instead of full URLs. A reference operates in the background of your CMS and connects content dynamically to each other.
If you change a URL down the track, every reference to it will update automatically on your live site. This can save your team hours of time that would otherwise be wasted finding and fixing broken links, all without them having to touch a single piece of code.
Final thoughts
There are some clear advantages to using a headless CMS for SEO. But, SEO is not the only factor to consider, and it’s often a decision outside of the SEO team’s control.
It’s worth pitching headless SEO to the decision-makers in your organization if:
- You need a more flexible approach to content deliverability.
- You’d like total control over every on-page and technical SEO element.
- You’d like to unlock omnichannel marketing capabilities.
- You need a more scalable solution for content publishing.
- You’d like to deliver better user experiences on your front-end.
- You’d like to better segment content by locale or language.
Have any questions? Got a cool headless SEO use case to share? Reach out on LinkedIn and let me know.
SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article 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.
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.
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.
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:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- 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.
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!
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
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.
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:
“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:
“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.
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.
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:
- 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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SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
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:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- 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.
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