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How To Perform A SEO SWOT Analysis

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How To Perform A SEO SWOT Analysis

For most organizations, implementing an effective SEO (search engine optimization) strategy involves collecting and analyzing significant amounts of keywords, content, analytics, and competitive data from various sources.

SEO professionals then need to use this data to prioritize keyword, content, structural, and/or linking tasks to address issues or build on existing organic search authority.

One familiar method of prioritization, which lends itself well to helping focus attention and often maximize limited SEO and marketing resources, is the SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) framework.

A SWOT, by definition, is geared to help identify items with the biggest potential impact on growth – or the most dangerous threats.

The following breakdown of organizational SEO priorities assumes keyword research has already been done and is being used for the website, SERP (Search Engine Results Page), and competitive data, which will be the foundation of an effective SWOT.

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Keyword research alone is often deserving of its own SWOT process.

Strengths

One of the primary factors search engines use in determining your organic search visibility is an organization’s relative strength and authority for a topical group of keywords.

Identifying those keywords for which the organization already has some authority – or as some like to call “momentum” in the eyes of the search engines – is an excellent place to begin focusing your attention.

Authority is generally difficult to come by and takes time to establish, so why not build on what you already have.

Your first question should be, “Which pieces of content do I have that rank well (let’s say in the top 20 results) in the search engines for my primary keyword groups?”

Recognizing where you have existing strength can be leveraged in three ways:

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  1. Look for opportunities to link out from or to your strongest pieces of content. This can have the dual effect of reinforcing your original piece of content by linking to more comprehensive answers to your audiences’ questions and borrowing from the authority of the strongest piece.
  2. Perform full-page keyword, technical, and link audits on all webpages that rank between positions five and 20 to see where any improvements can be made to move them higher in the SERPs. This may mean adjusting title tags, headings, or updating links to more current or relevant sources.
  3. Determine whether the “right” landing pages rank for the keywords you want to be found for. While it may seem great to have your homepage rank for several of your keywords, this is not optimal.

Searchers who land on your homepage looking for something specific will have to spend more time clicking or searching again to find the exact answer to their question.

Identify the pages you have that provide answers, and focus on having them usurp the position currently maintained by the homepage.

If you determine such pages don’t exist, then it’s time to create them.

Be sure to also pay attention to the types and characteristics of your strongest content pieces as signals to what content to create moving forward.

For example, if you have videos ranking well on Google and/or YouTube, by all means, create more videos.

If long-form blog posts dominate the top of the search results for your primary keywords, this is your cue to publish and share more of the same.

Weaknesses

We all have our weaknesses; when it comes to SEO, recognizing and admitting them early on can save us a great deal of effort, time, money, and lost business.

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Keywords And Content

While there are undoubtedly keyword groups we feel we must be found for, it’s important to let go of those which will require too much time and/or effort to establish authority for.

Generally, a quick review of the search engine results will reveal keywords that are out of reach based on your competitors’ size, age, reputation, and quality of content.

In this case, looking at the more specific long-tail and intent-driven keyword alternatives may be necessary or considering other avenues (including paid) to generate visibility, traffic, and conversions.

Sometimes, the best strategy is to employ complementary paid search tactics until you can establish organic search authority.

Technical Audit

Another area of weakness, which you can readily control more, maybe the quality of your own website and content from a technical/structural, keyword relevance, or depth perspective.

You can begin identifying areas of weakness by conducting an SEO audit.

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There are several excellent free and paid tools available, including Google Lighthouse and Search Console (specifically the Core Web Vitals Report and Mobile-Friendly Test), which will provide a prioritized list of issues and/or errors found in the title and heading tags, internal and external links, website code, keyword usage/density, and a myriad of mobile-friendly factors.

Screenshot of Lighthouse in Chrome Dev Tools, July 2022

As noted above, you should start by focusing on and fixing any issues found on those pages for which you already have some authority based on search engine results.

Optimizing these pages can only help improve their chances of moving up the SERPs.

You can move on to other priority web pages based on website analytics data or strategic importance.

Backlinks

Organically obtained, relevant, quality backlinks (aka inbound links) are still a search engine ranking factor as they speak to, and can enhance, the authority of the site to which they link.

As with site auditing, many good third-party backlink tools can reveal where you maintain backlinks. These are particularly useful for looking at the backlink sources of your strongest-known competitors.

Where appropriate, you may want to reach out to obtain links from the same relevant sources to leverage their authority.

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Opportunities

In SEO, opportunities abound for those who know how, where, and who take the time to look.

SEO is really about moving from one opportunity to the next.

Once optimization is deemed successful for one group of keywords or pieces of content, it’s time to move to the next topic upon which authority can be established or reinforced.

Keywords And Content

Several keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, and others can discover both keyword and content opportunities or gaps based on providing your website domain, the domains of your known competitors, or a targeted list of keywords.

Most provide prioritized lists of potentially high-value keywords based on estimated monthly search volumes, organic traffic, and/or relative competition.

In other words: Which high-value keywords are your competitors ranking for which you are not?

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As with the Weaknesses above, part of this analysis should consider the level of effort required to obtain authority relative to the potential return on establishing organic visibility.

Is it a worthwhile opportunity?

Semrush Keyword Gap ToolScreenshot of Semrush Keyword Gap tool, July 2022
A more manual process for discovering keyword and content opportunities is to run a reverse website audit on competitors’ websites.

Or, spend some time simply reviewing your top competitors’ primary pages, paying particular attention to the keywords used in title tags, headings, and internal link anchor text.

These are presumably the keywords that matter most to them.

However, be careful, as this strategy assumes the competition has conducted their own keyword research and has been following SEO best practices, which may or may not always be the case.

Focusing on those competitors who rank well for your primary keywords should single out the ones who are intentionally optimizing for search.

Content Refresh

Another opportunity within a web presence is the refresh of top-performing or complementary content.

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First, scan the SERPs or a preferred keyword tool to identify older content that is ranking for target keywords or serves to support other primary content pages.

Then, review this content to see where there may be opportunities to update text, images, internal/external links, or any other components.

Perhaps there’s an opportunity to enhance the piece by creating and adding images or videos.

Finally, re-share this content via appropriate channels, and perhaps consider identifying new avenues – as a previously popular piece of content will likely perform well again.

Existing content offers an excellent opportunity to build authority, often with just a little extra effort.

Backlinks

While typically a manually intensive process, there is long-term value in seeking out backlinks.

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Ideally, you want to identify relevant, authoritative websites/domains from which high-quality inbound links can be obtained.

There are several sources you can use to start looking for inbound links:

The SERPs for your primary keywords are a natural backlink research starting point, as the websites found here are, by definition, considered “relevant” and “authoritative” by the search engines.

Of particular interest are those sites which rank ahead of yours because they presumably have higher authority upon which you can piggyback.

Look for any non-competitive backlinking opportunities such as directories, association listings, or articles and blog posts that you may be able to contribute to, get mentioned in, or comment on.

The Google Search Console Links Report is the next best resource for backlink research, as it indicates what Google recognizes as the domains linking to your content.

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Here you can validate the quality and accuracy of the links you already have, as well as determine if there are any other opportunities to obtain additional links from these same domains.

Referral sources in Google Analytics represent external sites that send you traffic but may or may not be providing an organic search boost.

Review these domains/sites regularly to see other linking opportunities.

4. As noted under Weaknesses, several third-party backlink tools can be used to identify potential backlink sources where links to your competitors can be found.

Some will even help by authority ranking and prioritizing the value of each existing and potential source, which can save significant time.

Threats

Whether done intentionally or not, there are more than a few things which can threaten organic authority in the eyes of the search engines and should be prioritized to avoid potentially damaging penalties.

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Content

The primary content threat most are familiar with is duplicate content, which, as the name suggests, is content repurposed on a website without proper attribution to the original source.

To avoid being penalized for using this type of content, you must be sure to include rel canonical tags by referencing the source content in the headers of pages containing the duplicate content.

In other words: It’s okay to have some duplicate content on a website, as long as the original source is properly identified.

Backlinks

While relevant, high-quality backlinks can help boost your authority, irrelevant, low-quality inbound links from non-reputable sites (particularly those that are part of paid link schemes) can do long-lasting harm and even get you tagged with a manual penalty.

The threat here is a potential loss of organic visibility and traffic.

Further, recovering from a manual penalty is not an easy or quick process.

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Simply put, you should never pay for backlinks and ensure any backlinks you acquire have not been purchased on your behalf by a third party, like a marketing agency.

As such, you should regularly review the Google Search Console Links report or other backlink reporting sources for questionable domains or those you don’t recognize as relevant.

Competitors

All online competitors creating their own content represent threats to your authority.

Even if you maintain strong organic visibility and traffic relative to your “known” competitors, there is always the potential for new, aggressive, or unknown competitors to come onto the scene.

Many of the aforementioned SEO tools provide competitor discovery tools to help quickly identify domains that consistently appear in the search results for your primary keywords.

Oftentimes, there may be competitors here you’ve never considered. You’ll naturally want to pay attention to these competitors and use the tactics noted above to see what you can learn from them.

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Search engines love and reward fresh, relevant content, and Google even has a freshness algorithm to identify it.

As such, you should regularly monitor the search engine results for new entrants, which may, over time, challenge your authority and position.

Of course, the best way to combat this type of threat is by continuing to publish and update your own comprehensive content, which will give the search engines less reason to question your authority.

Actioning On The SWOT

The detailed SWOT outputs will map prioritized actions to protect and/or improve online authority, visibility, and resulting traffic, leads, and revenue.

Proactive search marketers should conduct these analyses on at least a bi-annual, if not quarterly, basis, depending on how competitive the industry is and how active the competitors are.

A well-structured SWOT can provide an excellent roadmap for where, when, and how often action needs to be taken or content needs to be created and shared to boost your organization’s primary SEO goals.

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How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO

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Step-by-Step: How to Optimize Old Blog Posts for SEO

Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.

If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.

However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.

Ways to Optimize Older Content 

Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort. 

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Refresh Content 

If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.

Rewrite Old Blog Posts 

When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely. 

This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.

Delete Old Blog Posts 

You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it. 

Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.

Promote Old Blog Posts 

Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.

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Which Blog Posts Should You Update?

Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit. 

Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.

If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings. 

Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic. 

With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.

How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO

Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.

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Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.

Conduct New Keyword Research

Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic. 

Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too. 

Look for New Ranking Opportunities

When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it. 

Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags

If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags. 

Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:

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  1. Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
  2. Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
  3. Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made. 

Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page. 

Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags. 

Replace Outdated Information and Statistics

Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.

Tighten or Expand Ideas

Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more. 

Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:

  • Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
  • Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
  • Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
  • Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
  • Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
  • Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
  • Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.

Improve Visuals and Other Media

No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality. 

Update Internal and External Links

Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.

You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.

Optimize for Conversions

When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years. 

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So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.

Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post. 

Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.

Key Takeaway

Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions. 

By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!

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How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages

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Compression can be used by search engines to detect low-quality pages. Although not widely known, it's useful foundational knowledge for SEO.

The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.

Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.

What Is Compressibility?

In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.

TL/DR Of Compression

Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.

This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:

  • Identify Patterns:
    A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases
  • Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
    The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size.
  • Shorter References Use Less Bits:
    The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.

A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.

Research Paper About Detecting Spam

This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.

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Marc Najork

One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.

Dennis Fetterly

Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.

Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.

Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis

Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.

Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.

Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:

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“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”

The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.

They write:

“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.

…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”

High Compressibility Correlates To Spam

The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.

Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.

The researchers concluded:

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“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”

But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:

“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.

Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:

95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.

More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”

The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.

Insight Into Quality Rankings

The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.

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The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.

The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.

This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:

“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.

For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”

So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.

Combining Multiple Signals

The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.

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The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:

“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”

These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:

“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”

Key Insight:

Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.

What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.

Takeaways

We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.

Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:

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  • Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
  • Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
  • Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
  • In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
  • When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
  • Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
  • Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.

Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:

Detecting spam web pages through content analysis

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New Google Trends SEO Documentation

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Google publishes new documentation for how to use Google Trends for search marketing

Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.

The new guide has six sections:

  1. About Google Trends
  2. Tutorial on monitoring trends
  3. How to do keyword research with the tool
  4. How to prioritize content with Trends data
  5. How to use Google Trends for competitor research
  6. How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment

The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.

Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.

To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.

The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.

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Google explains:

“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”

Read the new Google Trends documentation:

Get started with Google Trends

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero

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