SEO
How RTINGS.com Dominates Product Niches (SEO Case Study)
RTINGS.com (small for “ratings”) is one of the few affiliate websites that dominate the search results for a wide range of consumer electronic products, including televisions, headphones, and vacuum cleaners. It ranks high even for some of the most generic, fat-head keywords like “tv,” which has an estimated volume of 462K monthly searches in the U.S. alone.
As of October 2022, the website drives approximately 9.5M organic search clicks in a month, making up a massive 160% year-over-year growth:
Like many other successful affiliate websites, it started by just reviewing televisions. It’s best known for its straight-to-the-point, in-depth, and data-driven reviews.
However, unlike Wirecutter, RTINGS.com doesn’t come up in conversations in SEO communities during discussions on affiliate marketing or case studies in general. But there’s a lot to learn from its website’s success.
When I started my research, something that impressed me the most was its website structure and the usage of programmatic SEO. Here are the most interesting takeaways:
A properly planned website structure is invaluable when building your SEO foundation. It helps visitors and search engines quickly discover and navigate content while supporting your SEO efforts.
But it’s easier said than done, especially when designing one for a large website. The approach needs to be scalable by keeping the future of the website in mind.
With over 20K+ indexed pages (based on the site: search operator), RTINGS.com requires a robust website structure to win on the SERPs. And it’s nailed it.
Let’s understand its structure better by analyzing its “tv” subfolder, which has over 2.1K pages and is responsible for 23% of the total organic traffic:
Below are the top organic keywords for the “tv” subfolder. And if you look closely, you’ll find that the website ranks on the first page for all sorts of keywords with various search intents:
In general, we can classify most of the articles as:
- Reviews of individual products (e.g., lg c1 review).
- Best of posts (e.g., best samsung tv, best 120 hz tv).
- Informational posts (e.g., what is refresh rate, oled vs qled).
- Comparison articles (e.g., lg c1 vs c2).
Here’s a bird’s-eye view of its website structure:
It’s worth going into more detail here.
Brand categories and product pages
All the television reviews are hosted inside their own brand subfolders:
You can see that one of the brand pages with the highest traffic is the brand category page. These are all dedicated articles that are often updated:
And they pass valuable link equity to the individual product review pages RTINGS.com chose to feature there. These pages then shine on the SERPs, thanks to their schema markup implementation:
Best by [parameter] pages
Finding the best television that fits your budget and requirements likely starts with broader search queries than specific product reviews. It can be on the basis of the size of the TV (e.g., best 65 inch tv), on the usage (e.g., best tv for playstation), or refresh rate (e.g., best 120 hz tv). In fact, RTINGS.com has content for six such overarching parameters with a proper subfolder for each.
This is how the parameters navigation looks like on the website:
Learn (tv/learn/)
Informational articles create great support for the review content seen above. For example, besides reviewing OLED televisions, RTINGS.com has content about the technology behind them and the pros and cons as well.
Here’s a look at the top “learn” pages in the TV niche:
The subfolder shown above drives 83.3K organic traffic, which is nice. But it pales in comparison to what RTINGS.com drives to its review content. However, such informational content further educates readers and boosts topical authority. These are invaluable benefits, which this supporting content provides.
With so many products on the market and more released every other day, it only makes sense to compare one with the other before making a purchase decision. But covering all of this content usually requires a huge team of writers.
This brings the question of whether complete human content curation is necessary in this case. The RTINGS.com team seems to have taken a hybrid approach and makes use of programmatic SEO to make things easier to produce and scale.
Programmatic SEO is a method used to generate many pages from a set of data using the power of automation with the goal of ranking on Google.
For example, rather than writing a dedicated review comparing AirPods’ first generation with the second generation and other alternatives, it’ll compare the two on the basis of certain parameters like the battery life, bass, fitting, and more.
Something to note here is the focus on visual comparisons too:
RTINGS.com used this method and created a comparison tool for multiple consumer electronic categories like televisions and headphones. The Headphones Comparison Tool, for example, currently has 2.4K pages published and drives over 200K organic search clicks every month.
What could be surprising to many is that it’s also monetizing the comparisons through a monthly subscription that provides users with unlimited access to all its tools and early access to test results for new products. So if you’re in two minds about programmatic SEO, you should keep in mind that there’s an audience ready to pay for such content.
Each comparison page is hosted on a different URL that looks to be generated by some sort of algorithm. Each individual page can be indexed and drive organic traffic.
However, the RTINGS.com team still likely takes on quite a bit of manual work on those pages, including writing review summaries, creating title tags, and so on. Here’s a look at the top-ranking comparison keywords:
If you’re interested in another example of using programmatic SEO, check out the Wise SEO case study as well.
Continuously adding and updating internal links is a rather low-hanging SEO fruit for many websites. Internal links not only pass link equity but also help with discoverability and creating a delightful experience for the reader (as long as they’re relevant, of course).
The Best by links report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer shows us that some of RTINGS.com’s pages, even deep down the site structure, get thousands of internal links:
For example, individual TV reviews can be mentioned in “best of” posts, as done below:
Additionally, it has a dedicated “related article” section, which likely promotes its most important pages and contributes to the huge number of internal links some pages get.
Improving navigation
Once a website starts counting its pages in the tens of thousands, the user experience from the navigation and discoverability point of view becomes critical to success. A good UI/UX is equally important to a properly planned website structure here. And there’s a lot we can learn about that from RTINGS.com.
For example, look at its homepage and how good a job it does to show new and updated posts. It’s minimal yet usable.
All the articles are tagged under “New,” “Update,” or “Early Access.” It also shows the number of articles published under each category, instantly adding a lot of credibility. The best part for me is the menu bar for each category.
We’re in 2022, and there are many who prefer watching a video review to reading a detailed article. Since all of RTINGS.com’s devices go through so many tests, it only makes sense to document everything and share it in a video. The team figured this out early on—2013, to be exact.
As of October 2022, its channel has 327K subscribers and over 58M views:
Most of its videos are either product reviews or comparisons. All the videos are linked to the review articles it publishes, and this is where we start to create the SEO connection.
The thing is that its website and YouTube channel both rank on the first page for many keywords, maximizing its SERP “real estate.”
While it hasn’t seen a hockey stick growth in terms of subscribers, its videos have consistently garnered views monthly.
Overall, YouTube is the perfect channel it can double down on to increase its organic visibility. There’s tremendous potential. In fact, it ranks on the first page for over 100K keywords where Google shows videos in the SERP results. All it needs to do is identify the right products and publish videos about them.
Last but not least, I love how it uses the Community tab to connect with subscribers by showing them behind-the-scenes content of upcoming reviews.
Just think about the content distribution benefits of having a highly engaged community. Connections to SEO are pretty much everywhere.
Final thoughts
RTINGS.com has created a strong moat in a few product niches over the years. This has helped it to grow from an already impressive monthly organic traffic of 2M two years ago to over 9M today.
There’s a lot to learn from it, especially if you’re looking for tips on improving website structure or planning to run experiments using programmatic SEO.
Got any questions? Ping me on Twitter.
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
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
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
SEO
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
The largest presentation screen I’ve ever seen! #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/oboiMFW1TN
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is the biggest presentation screen I ever seen in my life. It’s like iMax for SEO presentations. #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/sAfZ1rtePx
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF
It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.
The Ahrefs conference venue feels like being in inception. #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/18Yjai1Cej
— Suganthan Mohanadasan (@Suganthanmn) October 24, 2024
I’m in Singapore for @ahrefs Evolve this week. Keen to connect with people doing interesting work on the future of search / AI #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/s00UkIbxpf
— Alex Denning (@AlexDenning) October 23, 2024
OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
“would I even do this if Google didn’t exist?” – what a great question to assess if you actually have the right focus when creating content amazing presentation from @amandaecking at #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/a6OKbKxwiS
— Aleyda Solis ️ (@aleyda) October 24, 2024
Attending @CyrusShepard ‘s talk on WTF is Helpful Content in Google’s algorithm at #AhrefsEvolve
“Focus on people first content”
Super relevant for content creators who want to stay ahead of the ever evolving Google search curve! #SEOTalk #SEO pic.twitter.com/KRTL13SB0g
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
— Parth Suba (@parthsuba77) October 24, 2024
@thinking_slows thoughts on AI content – “it’s very good if you want to be average”.
We can do a lot better and Ryan explains how. Love it @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/qFqWs6QBH5
— Andy Chadwick (@digitalquokka) October 24, 2024
A super insightful explanation of how Google Search Ranking works #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/Cd1VSET2Aj
— Amanda Walls (@amandajwalls) October 24, 2024
This is the first time I am listening to @aleyda and it is really amazing. Lot of insights and actionable information.
Thank you #aleyda for power packed presentation.#AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs #seo pic.twitter.com/Xe3A9MGfrr
— Jignesh Gohel (@jigneshgohel) October 25, 2024
GREAT MUSIC
First time I’ve ever Shazam’d a track during SEO conference ambience…. and the track wasn’t even Shazamable! #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs pic.twitter.com/ZDzJOZMILt
— Lily Ray (@lilyraynyc) October 24, 2024
AMAZING GOODIES
Ahrefs Evolveきました！@ahrefs @AhrefsJP #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/33EiejQPdX
— さくらぎ (@sakuragi_ksy) October 24, 2024
Aside from the very interesting topics, what makes this conference even cooler are the ton of awesome freebies
Kudos for making all of these happen for #AhrefsEvolve @ahrefs team pic.twitter.com/DGzk5FSTN8
— Krista Melgarejo (@kimelgarejo) October 24, 2024
Content Goblin and SEO alligator party stickers are definitely going on my laptop. @ahrefs #ahrefsevolve pic.twitter.com/QBsBuY5Yix
— Patrick Stox (@patrickstox) October 24, 2024
This is one of the best swag bags I’ve received at any conference!
Either @ahrefs actually cares or the other conference swag bags aren’t up to par w Ahrefs!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/Yc9e6wZPHn— Moses Sanchez (@SanchezMoses) October 25, 2024
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!
Got the rare selfie with both @timsoulo and @samsgoh #AhrefsEvolve
— Bernard Huang (@bernardjhuang) October 24, 2024
THAT BELL
Everybody’s just waiting for this one.
@timsoulo @ahrefs #AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/6ypWaTGDDP
— Jinbo Liang (@JinboLiang) October 24, 2024
STICKER WALL
Viva la vida, viva Seo!
Awante Argentina loco!#AhrefsEvolve pic.twitter.com/sfhbI2kWSH
— Gaston Riera. (@GastonRiera) October 24, 2024
AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!
#AhrefsEvolve let’s goooooooooooo!!! pic.twitter.com/THtdvdtUyB
— Tim Soulo (@timsoulo) October 24, 2024
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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!
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