SEO
Influencers Drive Global B2B Content Marketing Success
With the mountain of competition in B2B, establishing trust with potential buyers is no easy feat.
Unlike in ecommerce, where transactions are typically swift, and purchases are at far lower prices, B2B sales cycles are lengthier and involve much higher stakes.
With endless opportunities to choose from, community has become more crucial than ever, as people search and check social media but ultimately rely on trusted peers for advice when making important business decisions.
So how can B2B businesses ensure their content stands out and gets noticed – and most importantly, trusted – by their target audience?
This is where influencers, or subject matter experts (SMEs) in the B2B realm, play a pivotal role – particularly in the context of expanding to international markets that speak multiple languages.
By harnessing the reach and reputation of well-known SMEs in the local markets, B2B companies can amplify their international content marketing efforts, ensuring that their message resonates with diverse international audiences.
Over time, SME collaborations enable B2B companies to cultivate a strong community around their brand, which then drives inbound leads and growth across international markets.
Why Involving Local Influencers & SMEs In International B2B Content Marketing Campaigns Is Crucial
Extensive research plays a hefty role in the B2B buying process, in that:
- B2B buyers complete up to 70% of their research prior to even contacting a sales team.
- 87% of B2B buyers say online content has a major or moderate impact on vendor selection.
- 78% of B2B referrals create viable customer leads for the business.
What do all three of those points have in common?
B2B buyers are looking for a trustworthy source to confirm information found during their research.
As such, partnering up with SME influencers is key to building up this crucial brand trustworthiness, especially if you’re a global brand expanding into diverse international markets worldwide.
In fact, up to 86% of B2B brands have reported some measure of success with highly targeted influencer marketing.
But selecting the relevant influencers for the right market is key for content to resonate with local target audiences.
For example, a highly knowledgeable SME from New York City is unlikely to have much sway or influence if you’re targeting customers in Tokyo, on the other side of the world.
This is because:
- An English-speaking influencer has little effect on a primarily Japanese-speaking audience.
- Perceptions towards B2B products and services vary by location because buyers’ needs differ by region.
- Cultural tendencies of buyers in niche markets have significant sway over purchase decisions.
- If influencers lack shared cultural values with the local target audience, their recommendations will fall flat on that audience.
How To Identify And Build Relationships With Local B2B Influencers And SMEs
So, how do you identify the right SME collaboration to expand the authority of your own business in a new market? And how can you build a relationship with them in order to incentivize the SME to collaborate with you?
Let’s now take a deep dive into the process.
Step 1: Research People Who Matter To Your Local Target Audience
It all starts with researching who your audience cares about. A free tool like SparkToro is one of the easiest ways to get started.
Based on your search filter, SparkToro identifies who your target audience follows and trusts as a source of credible information.
You can then curate lists of relevant SMEs for the market you’re looking to expand to, which should ideally also include lesser-known yet still highly credible SMEs whose audiences tend to be more engaged.
To give you a concrete idea, here’s an example of a SparkToro search for a company that provides consulting services and a SaaS tool for document automation. Its goal is to expand into the German market.
I set the filter for “my audience frequently talks about,” typed in “document automation,” and selected Germany for the location.
SparkToro then summarizes the list of influencers, websites, and lesser-known destinations that earn engagement with that buying audience:
In this case, there is a mix of English-language and German-language influencers and relevant publications. Ideally, you’ll want to focus on gaining credibility within the local language, so SparkToro is the just starting point.
You’ll then need to dig deeper into what and who is relevant to contact, as well as invest time into building relationships with SMEs, depending on the relevance of their followers.
Step 2: Identify Ways To Involve Them That Require Little Effort On Their Behalf
Once you’ve conducted the research and identified the relevant SMEs to collaborate with within the local market, the next step is to determine how best to approach them.
Keep in mind that the most effective outreach strategy is one that makes it as easy as possible for SMEs to see the value in a partnership. Don’t just beg for their time and offer up nothing in return.
For example, you can offer for them to attend a panel discussion on a highly relevant topic for their industry and local market.
Here’s an example of how you might contact an SME for collaboration via LinkedIn or email:
Image created by author, May 2023This type of message prompts a response from SMEs for a few reasons:
- They know they’ll be advertised without paying.
- They don’t have to spend tons of time preparing, especially as it’s a panel discussion, so their time commitment is minimal.
- They have a chance to network with and learn from well-known people within their industry, bringing back benefits for their personal and company brands.
Step 3: Nurture Relationships And Provide Ongoing Value
Finally, once you connect with an SME and convince them to collaborate together, you want to maintain and deepen that working relationship, because this increases the chance of future collaboration opportunities.
In fact, if the relationship becomes a strong one, the influencer is likely to refer your B2B business to their network, or even come back to you themselves as a customer.
This is actually the long-term strategic value of such partnerships because it directly impacts high-quality inbound lead generation.
Ways to strengthen ongoing relationships with SMEs include:
- Regularly engaging with their own content, such as by commenting on or sharing their updates to support their efforts and keep your brand top-of-mind as they continue producing new content for their own audience.
- Offering to mention them and/or link to their content in future content you create.
- Offering to meet up for a coffee at in-person conferences and get to know them.
- Develop a partner referral agreement so you both can refer potential customers and generate inbound leads.
- Continuing to collaborate on marketing efforts together where both brands are promoted.
How To Apply B2B Influencer And SME Data To Both Global & Local Content Marketing Efforts
Now that you’ve got the process in mind, what are some direct examples of how to apply SME collaborations across content marketing efforts?
I’ll cover this in further detail in the below section for various types of content marketing applied both globally and locally.
Panel Discussions & Co-marketing Webinars
As mentioned in the message example from the how-to section above, panel discussions are a highly effective method for beginning engagement with SME influencers because they require little to no preparation time for the participants.
Plus, in nearly every market, industry titans enjoy conversing with their fellow experts to share insights and recommendations to listening audiences.
Panel discussions can be both live or virtual events, but regardless of the format, they’re a great resource that elevates the authority of your own brand to your audience due to the SMEs who attend.
Global Approach
To give an example that works globally, here’s an example of a live panel discussion about the secrets of successful influencer marketing and content creation.
Screenshot from The NAMM Show, May 2023This topic applies globally because it’s a question that brands all over the world struggle to answer.
When applied to your own content strategy, ideally, the SMEs invited to such a discussion should come from multiple markets, particularly those that you plan to expand into internationally.
An important point to note: global in-person events should be treated as annual affairs.
Creating a one-time event that pools together the biggest influencers in an industry is a special occasion, so it’s not something to do regularly, as they come with higher resource costs for both you and the participants.
Local Approach
When applying the concept of a panel discussion within a local market, you can go much smaller in scale and ideally virtually, which provides more flexibility to create recurring panel discussions throughout the year.
Start by selecting a topic that is relevant to the local market and the target audience.
For instance, if you’re an IT company and are targeting German businesses, you could host a panel discussion on “How German Companies Can Finance Digital Transformation” (but in the German language equivalent).
Then, use your SparkToro account to identify the biggest German influencers in the IT industry and invite them to participate in a special panel discussing tips to scale digital transformation across Germany.
Here’s an example from a similar event:
Screenshot from germany-finance.com, May 2023By hosting a panel discussion with local SMEs who speak German, you present valuable insights to your buying audience in Germany in that localized setting and context.
You can then deepen relationships with key players that your target audience already follows, and follow up by creating localized content that resonates with those same local market buyers to guide them further on their buying journey with your brand.
Whitepapers
Whitepapers are one of the most valuable resources in B2B content marketing when they include original data and information that isn’t available anywhere else.
You can make whitepapers with unique data by gathering information from SMEs.
Plus, SMEs typically appreciate being cited in whitepapers because their personal brand is attached to that in-depth report, which automatically elevates their own standing and credibility with their followers.
Global Approach
A global approach to this strategy is to select a topic that has a more universal appeal.
Again, digital transformation is a subject that impacts brands all over the world, so creating an in-depth whitepaper on the topic has global appeal – but only if it’s backed with information from highly credible SMEs.
A great example is the “Data and Digital Transformation: Insights From Shipping Leaders” whitepaper created by S&P Global Market Intelligence. It includes insights from six of the leading SMEs from various international markets.
In the same manner that S&P Global Market Intelligence has done here, ensure in your content strategy that the SMEs included for global content also appeal to your international target markets.
Local Approach
When it comes to the local approach, the main difference from the global is that you want to target the analysis and present the whitepaper findings within the context of a regional point of view.
Paralleling the global subject matter, you can create your own whitepaper explaining the ideal digital transformation journey for the shipping industry in one particular market.
As an example, let’s use the Port of Los Angeles, which continues to struggle with supply chain issues in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Your whitepaper can answer many of the questions that have ground supply chain businesses in Los Angeles to a halt by inviting SMEs with experience managing those ports to contribute information.
Although the example is in English, the concept applies across markets that speak other languages, too.
With a more localized approach, you gain specific insights to publish in your content and establish your brand as a thought leader in that particular market.
This also increases your opportunity to build relationships with key local players and generate leads and referrals from the target buying audience.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a heavily growing medium for B2B content marketing.
By collaborating with influencers and SMEs on a podcast, you can tap into their expertise and reach new audiences through audio content that millions of people stream throughout their busy days.
Global Approach
When building your podcast, start by identifying global influencers and SMEs with a strong following in your industry.
For example, if you’re an HR consulting company, you could collaborate with a senior HR specialist.
Choose a topic that would be of interest to both the global audience and the local influencers.
For instance, you could create a podcast episode on “The Future of Work in a Post-Pandemic World.”
You can follow examples from the HubSpot team that manages their podcast, “Culture Happens.” In this particular episode, they discuss the future of remote work.
You can even reach out to those same presenters and invite them to participate as guests on your own podcast discussing the topic in a similar but unique manner.
Through this collaboration, you tap into their wider audience, build your brand credibility, and generate new leads and referrals through your podcast.
Local Approach
The localized podcast approach involves identifying SMEs who have followings in particular markets and that speak the language that your business intends to target.
For instance, to localize the podcast example from above for France, you could do an episode around “Streamlining New Employment Regulations Around Remote Work in France” and invite an HR specialist from the French market to speak about their experience with handling these changes.
This helps you build a loyal following in concentrated local markets, which translates into higher volumes of inbound leads that grow your business internationally.
Collaborate with SMEs to Win and Global and International Content Marketing
In the highly competitive world of B2B, where trust and reputation are paramount, leveraging the expertise and influence of SMEs is a powerful strategy.
As you strive to make your mark in international markets, remember that collaborations with trusted and local influencers can help your content shine, resonate, and ultimately drive success in your B2B endeavors.
Over time, these partnerships with SMEs not only help you create valuable and trusted content but also cultivate a strong community around your brand.
By providing informative and practical content, you can position yourself as a B2B industry thought leader and trusted source of knowledge.
And most importantly, by tapping into the networks of global and local influencers, B2B businesses can drive inbound leads and foster growth in international markets.
More resources:
Featured Image: Chay_Tee/Shutterstock
Understanding the Impact of Google’s November 2024 Core Update on Global Search Rankings
Introduction
In November 2024, Google launched its latest core algorithm update, a broad refinement designed to enhance the quality of its search engine results. Rolling out over approximately two weeks, the update continues Google’s ongoing commitment to delivering more relevant, useful, and high-quality search experiences for users worldwide. This article explores the nature of the November 2024 Core Update, its potential impact on websites, and strategies for site owners to adapt and thrive in its aftermath.
1. What Is a Google Core Update?
Core updates are large-scale changes to Google’s search algorithms. Unlike targeted updates aimed at specific sectors or issues, core updates broadly impact all regions and languages. They reflect Google’s effort to re-evaluate how content is assessed and ranked based on relevance, usefulness, and reliability. Previous updates include significant releases like the March and August 2024 updates, illustrating the frequency and scope of these changes.
2. Goals of the November 2024 Core Update
The November update focuses on refining the quality of search results. According to Google’s official statements, it seeks to amplify genuinely useful content while reducing the visibility of content primarily designed to manipulate rankings without meeting user needs. This effort emphasizes Google’s consistent push for “people-first” content—engaging and useful information that serves users, not search engines.
3. Key Features and Characteristics of the Update
- Global Impact: The update affects search rankings on a global scale and is not confined to any particular industry or niche.
- Rollout Duration: Spanning about two weeks, the rollout’s timing allows Google to fully implement algorithmic changes and assess their effects.
- Broad Adjustments: The update doesn’t target specific sites but involves systemic reassessment across Google’s ranking systems.
- Dynamic Search Environment: This core update follows in the footsteps of the August and March 2024 updates, representing a year of significant search result refinement.
4. What This Means for Site Owners
- Traffic Fluctuations: Websites may observe shifts in rankings and traffic during the update’s rollout and subsequent completion. These changes highlight the dynamic nature of Google search and require continuous monitoring and adaptation.
- Recommended Actions:
- Wait and Analyze: Site owners experiencing changes should wait until the rollout’s completion before making significant adjustments.
- Utilize Google Search Console: Compare traffic and ranking data from before and after the update to identify potential areas of improvement.
- Focus on High-Impact Pages: Pages with notable drops in ranking should undergo thorough content evaluation using Google’s guidelines
5. Recovery and Adaptation Strategies
Recovering from a negative impact due to a core update may take weeks or months as Google’s systems adjust and validate content changes. Site owners should prioritize delivering high-quality, reliable, and user-focused content. Specific steps include:
- Content Evaluation: Assess content against Google’s guidelines, focusing on readability, user satisfaction, and factual accuracy.
- No Quick Fixes: Avoid superficial changes aimed solely at improving rankings. Sustainable improvements are more valuable and impactful(November 2024 core upda…).
- People-First Content: Ensure content serves real user needs, as opposed to purely SEO-driven objectives. This aligns with Google’s long-term priorities for search quality
6. Comparative Analysis with Previous Updates
The November 2024 Core Update continues trends observed in previous updates like March and August 2024. While each update has its nuances, their collective goal remains consistent: bettering search quality and delivering relevant results. Comparing data from these updates can reveal patterns and offer insights into Google’s evolving criteria
7. Broader Implications for the SEO Industry
Google’s ongoing core updates underscore the critical importance of a user-centric approach to SEO. For digital marketers and SEO specialists, adapting strategies to these updates involves staying informed, using reliable analytics tools, and keeping content fresh and engaging. The need for adaptability is paramount, as Google continually shifts the parameters of what defines quality content
Conclusion
The November 2024 Core Update serves as a reminder that Google’s algorithmic changes are not designed to punish but to reward helpful, authentic, and user-focused content. Site owners and marketers who embrace this philosophy are better positioned to weather core updates and even benefit from improved rankings and traffic over time. By maintaining a focus on user experience, transparency, and relevance, creators can align with Google’s evolving standards and thrive in the ever-changing digital landscape
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