SEO
How To Completely Optimize Your Google Business Profile
Google Business Profile is a free feature from Google that helps business owners manage their online presence across the search engine and its growing portfolio of utilities, including Google Maps.
Seasoned SEO professionals use Google Business Profiles to leverage a location-based strategy.
Creating a Google Business Profile is the first step to local search success.
And for good reason.
GBP offers the greatest impact for brands seeking local exposure.
A feature like Google’s Local Search emphasizes the need for a GBP for both new and established businesses.
Google Business Profiles: The Basics
It gives a list of businesses nearby and a lot of information needed to find a specific business like:
- Business address.
- Business hours.
- Category.
- Reviews.
Google’s Knowledge Graph also utilizes verified Google Business Profile information.
It helps generate details for its database about businesses and related entities that are relevant to specific searches.
Once a new profile is created, a Google Maps location is then generated.
That synchronizes with traditional Google Search for ease of access and searchability.
It certainly helps that the clear majority of organic searches come from Google – around 90% for worldwide search engine market share.
It also shows the value of a GBP and effective local SEO.
Use this guide to ensure you’ve completed your Google Business Profile correctly and optimized all possible facets of the tool.
Doing this will also give the most leverage for your business on Google and third-party platforms that use the Google Maps API to generate location information for users.
If digital marketing is a somewhat new endeavor for you and your business, there are some basics to know.
And it’s good to understand Google Business Profiles and the value they offer.
First off: Yes, using Google Business Profile is free.
And, no, a GBP doesn’t replace your business’s website.
Google Business Profiles complement a brand’s already-existing website(s) by giving it a public identity and presence with a profile on Google.
The information provided about a business through Google Business Profiles can appear in Google Search and Google Maps.
Any third-party platform utilizing the Google Maps API will also show Google Business Profiles regardless of what device type is being used to search.
If you’ve previously used certain Google tools to complement your business (Google+, for example), or your business has been operating for a while, chances are your business is already listed on Google Business Profiles.
Google My Business, Google Places for Business, and the Google+ Pages Dashboard were the best ways to manage your business information previously.
These have automatically been upgraded to Google’s universal platform, Google Business Profiles.
Starting Your Google Business Profile
The first step to getting your Google Business Profile up and running is to actually conduct a Google search to ensure your business doesn’t already have one.
You can also use Google’s in-platform search feature to locate your business on GBP.
If your business has been around for a while (several years or more), it’s likely it already has a GBP, and you just need to claim it.
Once successfully claimed, you can manage the information as if you started the GBP yourself.
If there is already a profile for your business, it will notify you.
It may also notify you that someone else has already claimed your business.
If that happens, follow these steps.
If your business profile is not already created, you can set it up pretty quickly.
Verification takes a bit longer to complete, but it can usually get done within a week.
Start with the official business name before inputting more important info. Then input your main business category.
You can change and add to this later, but this is a critical part of completing (and optimizing) your brand page.
Be sure to find the best relevant category for your business.
There are a lot of variations to choose from, but there should be at least one that summarizes your business best and most accurately.
You will then be asked if you want to “add a location customers can visit, like a store or office?”
This is valuable information since many businesses operate as service-area businesses and do not need/allow customers at the brick-and-mortar location.
For these instances, the specific location of the business will not show up on Google Maps.
However, the business will still show up for relevant searches in its service area.
For those businesses that operate in a specific service area and don’t want the actual brick-and-mortar location to show up in Maps, select the service area(s) that pertain to the business.
You can then add contact information for the business, including the contact phone number and the current website URL.
For businesses with that brick-and-mortar location that people can go to during business hours, you should add the business address next.
Once the address is set, Google Business Profile will ask if you “also service customers outside this location?”
It lets you set where/how far the business is willing to physically go to deliver goods or services.
If yes, you will be able to walk through the same service-area business details.
You can add or change service area details at any time.
If you don’t service customers outside of the brick-and-mortar, select No, then input contact details on the next prompt.
After that, you can then click Next to verify the profile.
Verifying Your Google Business Profile
You need to verify your Google Business Profile.
This is done via postcard by mail, which takes up to five business days.
It proves to Google you can manage and do, in fact, represent the business you claim.
Verifying your business is crucial for the visibility and performance of the profile.
It’s important to know that Google won’t display your business or its edits until the business is verified.
Without verification, you cannot access page insights/analytical information or business reviews from the back end.
Verification typically takes less than a week.
Google will send you a verification code postcard that you will use to verify your profile, and your business will officially be live.
After you confirm the verification method, you can add additional details about your business, including business hours, business messaging options, a business description, and photos.
Publishing Your Google Business Profile
Once you complete this process, you will be taken to Google Business Profile Manager, where you can manage your business profile and modify your details.
Here are some basic but crucial tips for optimizing your profile:
1. Enter Complete Data For Your Profile
Local search results favor the most relevant results for searches.
Businesses offering the most detailed and accurate information will be easier to serve in search.
Don’t leave anything to be guessed or assumed.
Make sure your profile communicates what your business does, where it is, and how they can acquire the goods and/or services your business is offering.
2. Include Keywords
Just like traditional website SEO, Google uses a variety of signals to serve search results.
Including important keywords and search phrases to your business profile will be incredibly helpful, especially since your business website is listed directly within your GBP.
Use these in the business description and each time you post a Local Post to your audience.
3. Keep Business Operating Hours Accurate
It’s important to put your business hours, but it’s equally important to update them whenever they change.
Google offers the ability to customize hours for holidays and other special events.
It should always be updated to keep your site accurate and users happy.
And, in the age of COVID-19, GBP offers even more flexibility around hours and messaging for potential customers.
Note: Additional hours won’t show for your business until regular hours are set.
4. Add Photos
Photos help business profiles’ performance more than most business owners and marketers probably expect.
Businesses with photos on their profiles receive 42% more requests for driving directions on Google Maps and 35% more click-throughs to their websites than businesses without photos, according to Google.
Keep reading for more GBP photo tips below.
5. Manage & Respond To Customer Reviews
Interacting with customers by responding to their reviews illustrates that your business values its customers and the feedback that they leave regarding it.
Positive reviews are going to have a positive effect on potential customers when researching your business.
They also increase your business’s visibility in search results.
Encourage customers to leave feedback by creating a link they can click to write reviews for your business.
6. Let Customers Message You
It can be somewhat inconvenient at times, but messages to and from customers are only available through the Google Business Profile app.
To do so, tap Customers, then Messages, then Turn on through the app.
Once enabled, customers will be able to message businesses through their Business Profiles with the Message button that appears.
Messages can have customized automated responses to welcome customers for incoming messages.
This helps with the responsiveness and visibility of the business since response times won’t suffer as badly.
For maximum performance and visibility through the GBP, it’s critical to keep message response time under 24 hours.
But obviously faster is better.
Customers don’t want to wait for answers, and oftentimes a fast answer is the difference between a customer and a non-customer.
7. Use Local Posts
You can publish offers, events, products, and services directly to Google Search and Maps through posts on Google Business Profiles.
Posts let you engage with your audience and keep your presence fresh on Google.
And they can be sent on the go from either a phone, tablet, or computer.
Businesses can also influence their Knowledge Panel breakouts with direct feedback about their businesses and the people that represent them.
Some Google-provided tips for making the most out of Local Posts are: Make sure each post is high-quality – free of spelling errors, broken characters, gibberish, or useless information.
And they should be respectful and non-offensive.
The best posts include visuals and links, but the links should always be to sites that are trusted.
Links that lead to malware, viruses, phishing, or pornographic material aren’t allowed.
Posts from businesses that operate on regulated goods and services are allowed to use posts but can’t post content related to the products themselves.
These industries typically include:
- Adult services.
- Alcohol and tobacco.
- Pharmaceutical products and recreational drugs.
- Health and medical devices.
- Gambling-related services.
- Fireworks.
- Weapons.
- Financial services.
These posts can and will show up in Google, so they need to be kept PG.
8. Stay Connected During COVID-19
This year has provided us with plenty of surprises. The biggest has been COVID-19 and the craziness it left (and continues to leave) in its wake.
If stores operate differently than normal due to COVID-19 restrictions, mandates, or safety guidelines, businesses can update their profiles on GBP to provide the most accurate information to customers.
Recently added features make communicating with current and potential customers easier in the time of the pandemic.
In addition to customizable business hours and Local Posts, a business can:
- Mark store temporarily closed.
- Manage delivery options.
- Add healthy and safety attributes.
9. Use The Special Attributes
Newer features to GBP allow Black-owned and women-led businesses to be highlighted on their profile.
These also allow for other features like outdoor seating and the like.
If the business is healthcare-related, additional attributes may be available including:
- Inform customers whether your business offers online care.
- Provide customers with a direct method to schedule and receive online care.
- Edit your gender information.
The attributes available to your listing depend on its primary category. Learn more about attributes here.
10. Use The Product Catalog
For merchants with products to showcase, GBP’s Product Editor allows them to do just that.
Most business types are eligible to showcase products, so long as they are small- and medium-sized businesses; and a few business verticals.
Larger businesses need to use Local Inventory Ads to showcase their products.
Offering information about products, including pricing, details, and photos, allows customers to get a better idea of products offered and interact more with businesses.
These product details also allow Google to better understand a business.
Photos & Videos For Your Google Business Profiles
The most important piece of imagery for a GBP is obviously the logo.
There likely won’t be an image that gets more exposure or has more of an impact.
Google recommends businesses use their logo to help customers identify your business with a square-sized image.
Other types of digital assets that should be added to your GBP are:
Cover Photo
Your cover photo should showcase your brand page’s personality.
The cover photo is the large photo featured at the top of the brand’s business profile, it will always be cropped to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio.
Interior Photos
This helps customers better understand the in-store experience at a business.
It lets business operators share the look and feel of the business interior, so make a good impression!
It also lets potential customers get a visual idea of the store, its layout, and any potential limitations it may have.
Video
Videos are one of the most popular media forms on the web.
It’s because they are extremely effective at telling a story and/or explaining something that could otherwise potentially be tough to explain.
Additional Photos
Other kinds of photos are used to spotlight features of your business that customers consider when making purchasing decisions.
These photos will differ from the above-mentioned rich media and are dependent on the kind of business you manage.
These photos may include other general photos that summarize the business and what it can do for its customers.
They can be:
- Goods and/or services your business offers.
- Business staff working and/or assisting customers.
- The exterior of the business and available parking.
All photos should follow Google’s best practices:
- Format: JPG or PNG
- Size: Between 10 KB and 5 MB
- Minimum resolution: 720 px tall, 720 px wide
- Quality: The photo should be in focus and well-lit, and have no alterations or excessive use of filters. The image should represent reality.
Google also offers the opportunity for a Virtual Tour, which will further enhance the brand profile’s visibility.
It can also draw traffic to the business with a 360-degree interactive experience.
Monitoring Your Google Business Profile Insights
Over the last several years, Google has made tremendous strides with available analytical data for Google Business Profiles.
Now called Insights, Google offers businesses a different way to understand how customers interact with business profiles, including:
- How customers find your profile.
- Where customers find you on Google.
- Customer actions.
- Direction requests.
- Phone calls.
How Customers Find Your Profile
This section of Insights shows how customers found you in a “Direct” search (they searched for your business name or address) versus a “Discovery” search (they searched for a category, product, or service that you offer, and your profile appeared).
These sections have the following labels in bulk insights reports:
- Total searches.
- Direct searches.
- Discovery searches.
Where Customers Find You On Google
This section shows how many customers found you via Google Search or Google Maps.
Besides Listing on Search and Listing on Maps, you’ll see the number of views your profile received from each product in the timeframe you’ve selected.
According to Google, “views” are like “impressions” on other analytics platforms.
To see how many people found you on a particular product on a particular day, place your cursor over the appropriate segment of the graph on the day you’re interested in.
These sections have the following labels in bulk insights reports:
- Total views.
- Search views.
- Maps views.
Customer Actions
This section shows what customers did once they found your profile on Google.
Total actions give the total of the following types of actions that customers took on your profile:
- Visit your website.
- Request directions.
- Call you.
- View photos.
The following labels are available as reports in this reporting section:
- Total actions.
- Website actions.
- Directions actions.
- Phone call actions.
- Direction requests.
This part of Insights uses a map to show where people are that are requesting directions to your business.
Your business location is identified on the map and some of the most common spots that people request directions to your business from are shown.
It even breaks the total number of direction requests down by city or neighborhood.
Phone Calls
This section shows when and how often customers called your business via your profile on Google.
At the top of the section, Total calls give the total number of phone calls for the selected time frame.
The graph offers the ability to view trends by phone calls by either day of the week or time of day.
This lets marketers and business operators know when customers are most likely to call after seeing your GBP.
Photos
Lastly, GBP allows you to examine how often your business’s photos are being viewed with the Photo views graph and Photo quantity graph.
There are also lines on the graphs that compare your business’s photo data with photo data for other businesses similar to yours.
Section of this reporting component includes bulk insights for:
- Total owner photos.
- Owner photo views.
- Total customer photos.
- Customer photo views.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
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
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
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