SEO
How to Start a Digital Marketing Agency (Advice From 100+ Founders)
Here’s how they started their agencies—and you can too.
Choosing what your agency focuses on should be a mix of what people want, what you know how to do (and are good at), and what you enjoy.
“I’m a big believer in only selling something you’re good at.”
Here’s what this looks like visualized:
Although finding a good agency niche isn’t a guaranteed recipe for success—it’s often the best place to start.
Tip
“I learned pretty early on that it is fruitless to try and offer SEO services to anyone and everyone, and you should either specialize in what you offer (e.g., link building or site audits) and who you offer it to (e.g., SaaS companies, eCommerce stores or people in the finance space) So it’s something I would have done differently from day one, and it’s what I would follow today if I was starting from zero.”
Based on Glen’s advice, to start your digital marketing agency, you’ll need to do two things:
- Work out what to sell
- Work out who to sell to
When starting a digital marketing agency, you’ll need to decide on the types of digital marketing services you want to sell.
In my opinion, it’s best to start by focusing on providing one single service (and doing it really well) you can always expand your offering later on.
Here are a few examples of popular digital marketing services you could sell:
As there are so many services that are classified as digital marketing, it’s tempting to say “yes” to every piece of work available when you start out—even if you aren’t an expert in it.
Agency founders told me that they learned the hard way that being the “one-stop shop” for all digital marketing services wasn’t always a good idea, as it watered down their expertise and message.
Most founders I spoke to agreed that it was best to focus on providing one service, especially when starting out—and that included Nathan Gotch:
“I’d focus on one market segment instead of building a catch-all agency.”
Once you’ve worked out what to sell, you’ll need to work out who to sell to.
Here’s some ideas for who you can sell to:
- Specific professions or industries – e.g., Dentists
- Customers in a particular location – e.g., Florida
- A combination of the two – e.g., Dentists in Florida
Identifying the industries or businesses interested in your services allows you to tailor your service and marketing strategies to resonate with your potential clients.
By focusing on specific markets, you can show the client that you are the expert in that area.
When you start your digital marketing agency, chances are you won’t have clients fighting their way to your door to work with you, so you’ll probably have to go and find them. But how do you do this?
Many agency founders I spoke to suggested that the more you specialize, the easier it is to become recognized as the expert for that particular service, meaning the clients naturally come to you.
So how can you specialize?
- Specialize in the types of services you provide – You can also specialize in providing a certain type of service for your clients. For example, if you can land high-quality links with a high success rate, then you could specialize in providing digital PR services
- Specialize in the types of businesses you work with – Only work with certain types of businesses. For example, you could choose to specialize in providing digital marketing for SaaS businesses, or you could specialize by only working with businesses from a certain location.
- Do both – You can take both the concepts above and become the expert at providing services for a certain type of business. For example, you could become the go-to agency for digital PR for fashion ecommerce stores
The downside of specialization is that it’s inevitable that you’ll have to turn down business opportunities. But in the long term, it can help carve out your agency’s reputation as the go-to provider for a certain audience, a certain service, or both.
One of my favorite quotes on this topic is from agency founder Amanda Sexton:
“Specialization does not just establish you as a consummate expert in a designated field. It acts as a magnet.”
Getting your first client is the hardest part of starting an agency. When I asked for advice, “use your network” is what agency owners told me time and time again. It sounds obvious, but it’s one of the most overlooked ways to find clients.
It can be as simple as talking to friends, family, colleagues, or anyone else you know and asking if they would be interested in your services or know anyone who would.
If you’ve exhausted your real-world connections, you can turn to social media to amplify your message further, as Liam Quirk did:
“LinkedIn and Instagram are valuable platforms to showcase expertise. I began by posting SEO case studies on LinkedIn, demonstrating our results and capabilities. This not only built my personal brand but also attracted potential clients who were seeking SEO services.”
And, as the name of the game is just to get noticed—anything that can help you do that is worthwhile. For example, Brendan Hufford started a 100-day project to get his name out there and get noticed:
“Starting out, it was just about getting my name out there. For example, I did a 100-day project where I published a blog, podcast episode, and YouTube video every day for 100 days (Ahrefs was a sponsor!)”
“Talk to local businesses” was another widely shared tip from agency founders.
It’s one of the most straightforward ways to find your first few clients. The benefit of doing business locally is that it’s generally less competitive, and you’re already likely to have knowledge of the local market and businesses.
Agency owners who focused on local businesses found that it was a good way to start out and distinguish themselves from other bigger, more established agencies.
“We specifically focused on the Wisconsin market as we started. This helped set us apart with our commitment to our local businesses.”
If you’ve exhausted your network and it’s not getting the leads you want, it’s worth casting your net wider by getting some work on freelance sites.
Here are a few examples of websites you can use to advertise your services:
As well as getting work on freelance sites, agency founders told me that they got work in social media communities, like Facebook groups.
“I started as a freelance SEO expert before starting an agency. I decided to go with the agency model after getting some clients and experience managing SEO clients. I got my first SEO client (as an SEO freelancer) from a Facebook group. I shared my keyword research guide there.”
The more work that you complete, the more you’ll start to build up your reputation, which will help you get more clients.
Cold calling and emailing have a bad reputation, but if you are starting out, it’s worth giving it a try. If you get your pitch right, it can kick start your agency, as it did for Joshua George, who got his first 20 clients through cold email using this method:
“We used to search for a keyword in Google, and we’d go from page 2 to page 7 of Google, find their names and email addresses, and send them an email.”
To get the most out of cold emailing and calling, it’s best to research your prospects beforehand and personalize your pitch to them. Joshua did this by following up with a personalized video afterward.
Once you’ve established your agency and got a few clients, founders told me their most valuable leads came from referrals from other partner agencies.
“We work with web development agencies, design agencies, and a paid advertising agency that all have clients that may need our services. These are the best types of leads because we have come highly recommended, and there’s usually very little, if any, competition for the work.”
If you want to start partnering with other agencies, a good place to start is by networking with the people who run them.
You can do this by:
- Searching for meetups in your area that interest you
- Following other agencies on LinkedIn and start engaging with their content
- Arrange video calls with other agency founders
Getting referrals from other agencies is one of the most effective ways to get clients—because there are usually no other agencies pitching for the same work, meaning less competition.
Another advantage of getting business this way is you don’t have the time-consuming procedure of pitching for the business, as you already come highly recommended.
Once you’ve identified potential clients, you’ll need to convince them to purchase your services—this is often easier said than done.
Here’s how you should approach this once you’ve found potential clients.
- Start by showing value, e.g., For SEO services, provide a video of their site’s current SEO issues and how to fix them
- Provide a solution through your agency’s services, e.g., For SEO, propose an initial SEO audit project
- Email the proposed roadmap, provide a forecast, and define the scope of the services you’ll be delivering to close the lead
Convincing clients to purchase your services gets easier as you build up your reputation, but it can take time.
Here are some things you can do to show the value of working with your agency early on.
Once you’ve got a few clients through the door, it’s time to start thinking about refining your service offering. One of the most critical elements of this is the pricing.
Price too low, you won’t be able to cover your costs. If you price too high, you may lose valuable clients—it’s a tricky balance.
Many of the agency founders that I spoke to said that they undervalued their services when they started out:
“Avoid offering rates lower than other similar agencies. You deserve the payment, clients anticipate certain costs, and reducing your prices can signal you’re unsure about the quality you deliver.”
Here’s how to get started: Your service pricing should be based on your total costs plus your margin.
Service pricing = total costs (staff, tools, office, equipment) + ~20% margin
The margin can be whatever percentage you want, but it needs to be realistic.
Digital marketing agencies have different pricing models, but the agencies I’ve worked at have used either the retainer or project-based pricing models. For instance, most SEO services are long-term and usually fit a retainer model for pricing, but an SEO audit might be more suited as a project.
Retainer pricing is where the client is charged a monthly fee for your services.
It’s one of the most common ways agencies charge their clients. The main reason is that it creates a predictable cash flow for the agency, which is useful as it enables you to plan for new hires and reinvestment back into the business.
Project-based pricing is where the client is charged per project. It’s useful for initial consultation and a good way for clients to “test” your services before entering into a retainer contract.
When I priced up projects in an agency setting, I would calculate the number of hours my team would take to complete the project multiplied by the hourly rate of the people doing the work. I would then add our agency’s margin to that figure.
Your agency’s reputation is dependent on the quality of the work that you put out. But unless you create templates, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and processes, you won’t be able to personally guarantee to clients when your agency expands that you can deliver what is required.
That’s why it’s a good idea to create SOPs and templates before you hire anyone else in the agency.
SOPs and templates ensure the following:
- Consistency – You can be sure that work is completed to a high standard that you define
- Efficiency – You can provide the most efficient method to complete the tasks
- Prioritization – Focusing on the important aspects of the service is crucial in order to retain your clients
When most people think of starting an agency, they imagine having their own office and having a team of full-time employees (FTEs) providing their digital marketing services, but the reality is that most agencies—including the really big ones—will use a mix of freelancers and FTEs to get the job done.
So, how do you start? It’s best to start with freelancers, as Matt Cayless suggests:
“We began with freelancers. This gave us flexibility and allowed us to scale our team according to the demand. However, as we grew and stabilized, we gradually transitioned to hiring full-time employees. My advice to new agency founders would be to assess your workload and growth trajectory.
While freelancers are great for flexibility and specific projects, full-time employees can be more invested in your company’s vision and growth. Also, as I’ve learned, don’t shy away from hiring top talent early on. Their expertise can fast-track your growth and save valuable time in the long run.”
FTEs and freelancers come with their own pros and cons.
- If you are looking for flexibility, then freelancers or working on a project basis freelancers would be the best fit
- If you want someone working 9-5 on a client retainer project, then you probably want to consider hiring an FTE
Another aspect to consider is that as your business grows and evolves, your demands (and perception of success) may change over time.
This is what Glen Allsopp realized:
“As I became more successful, I watched my mindset go from: ‘I want a huge team with amazing offices and dozens of staff,’ to ‘I want the smallest team I can possibly have’ where we all enjoy what we’re working on and work with dream clients.”
Finding the right people (and retaining talent) is usually just as tricky as getting clients. Even if you’re the world’s best digital marketer, it’s unsustainable to deliver the entire agency workload yourself, so you’ll need to delegate at some point.
Hiring your own team is crucial if you want to grow your agency, but it can be a delicate balance between success and failure, as agency founder Simon Schnieders pointed out:
“Hiring is literally the life and death of an agency. Over 50% of your costs will be labor. Over-hire, and you kill any margin, under-hire, and you kill your team and your customers. It’s a delicate balance.”
In my own experience, you need to look for people who would be a good fit for your team but, at the same time, have a hunger to learn and embrace change easily.
Approaches to hiring varied slightly from agency to agency—but I liked the simplicity of Joshua’s approach:
“Only hire someone that’s better than you at the role you’re hiring for.”
The same approach was also shared by Andy Barr at 10 Yetis.
Agencies often obsess with scaling quickly and hiring more people to establish themselves in the market, but hiring more people before the company’s ready could mean you commit financial suicide—-and also, you may find that you just don’t enjoy it.
“I always know I could have scaled things further by bringing on more people, but I know I wouldn’t enjoy what I do even half as much.”
Final thoughts
Starting a digital marketing agency is not for the faint-hearted. You’ve got to have drive, commitment, and a love of the business. The trickiest part is there is no blueprint for success—every agency is different.
But, if you’re able to find a great niche, hire great people, and deliver exceptional results for your clients, there’s no reason why your agency can’t be a success.
Got more questions? Ping me on X. 🙂
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