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Niche Site Ideas

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Niche Site Ideas

Finding the perfect niche site idea can seem like an impossible task when you’re starting out. So I decided to do the hard work for you and share 10 niche site ideas you can get going with immediately.

Let’s get started.

Hikers turn to Google for all kinds of inspiration. For example, if we search Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer for “best bikes in” and check the Matching terms report, we see hundreds of thousands of monthly searches for the best hikes in different locations.

Results for "best hikes in," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

You can easily create hundreds of blog posts to answer these informational questions and monetize with display ads.

But there are also hundreds of thousands of monthly searches for the best hiking gear where you can earn commissions from product reviews and recommendations.

For example:

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Results for "best hiking gear" in detail, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Let’s filter this list for low-difficulty keywords. It looks like there are plenty of lucrative opportunities where competition isn’t too fierce; for instance, “best hiking gloves”:

"Best hiking gloves" Keyword Difficulty and volume in detail, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

There are also plenty of searches for reviews of individual products, such as Sealskinz socks:

"sealskinz socks review" Keyword Difficulty and volume in detail, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

From my limited research, there doesn’t seem to be a dominant and trusted review site in this niche. This presents an excellent opportunity for someone passionate about hiking products to build a go-to brand in this niche.

In terms of monetization, you can use Amazon Associates or work with some of the hiking brands themselves. 

Many hiking brands have affiliate programs that pay decent commissions. 

For example:

Survival is another topic jam-packed full of niche site ideas. It’s gained traction in recent years with the emergence of “preppers” who buy emergency supplies in large quantities.

If we type “survival products” into Google and look at the Google ads, we can get an indication of the average price point of products in the survival niche.

Google SERP for "survival products"

As we can see, survival encompasses everything from dehydrated food kits to power sources, bags, lighting, and survival tools.

As preppers buy products in bulk or as kits, the average conversion value per order is typically higher. This is excellent news for affiliate marketers, as it means higher commissions. 

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To get a sense of the opportunity in this niche, let’s put the seed keyword “survival” into Keywords Explorer, go to the Matching terms report, and add “gear” to the “Include” filter. This will show us keywords containing “survival” and “gear.” 

Matching terms report results for "survival" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

You can see many angles you can take here if you want to specialize—everything from urban survival, to tactical survival, to military survival gear.

If we now update the “Include” filter to include “best,” we can hone in on some of the most lucrative affiliate keywords in this niche.

Matching terms report for the seed keyword "survival" with an "Include" filter containing the word "best," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

There are many keywords here, so it helps to refine this search further. From the above, we can see that people are searching for the “best survival food kits.” As “kits” is a word we have already encountered in the Google ads above, let’s dig into this keyword more in relation to our original seed keyword.

To do this, we’ll add “kit*” to our “Include” filter. 

Matching terms report for the search term "survival" with an "Include" filter containing "best" and "kit*," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Sidenote.

Adding the * wildcard to the end of our keyword enables us to account for any plural variations of our keyword.

We can see that there are many angles to look at here, with over 700 keywords to target. The keyword list is now much more relevant.

It’s worth noting that “Amazon” appears in the top keywords in the above image, which shows a strong buying intent on that platform for this particular niche. 

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In terms of monetization, you can use Amazon Associates. But many specialist survival brands have affiliate programs with much higher percentages. 

I have provided a few examples below:

Ebikes are a growing trend and typically have a higher retail price than road bikes. This makes them an attractive proposition for affiliate marketers, as commissions are high.

For example, if we look at the price of a Trek bike in the Google ads, we can see one that retails for almost $7,000. This would mean that you could get ~$280 commission at Trek’s 4% commission rate if someone bought this product through a link on your website.

Ads on Google SERP for "trek electric bikes"

Let’s take a closer look at this topic in Ahrefs to see what opportunities we can discover. 

If we plug “ebike” into Keywords Explorer, we see that its search volume trend is on a healthy upward trajectory.

Keyword overview of "ebike," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

As there is a lot of search volume here, let’s refine our search further to uncover more keyword opportunities. 

If a searcher wants to buy an ebike, they will likely search for the best ebikes, how two models stack up against each other, or related questions.

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Let’s take a look at these scenarios in more detail.

To find the “best” searches for ebikes, go to the Matching terms report, set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) to 0–20, and set the “Include” filter to include “best.” This will allow us to view low-KD keywords that contain the word “best.”

Matching terms for "ebike" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

OK, now let’s take a look at the vs. searches. 

To do this in Keywords Explorer, enter a few ebike brands as seeds, go to the Matching terms report, and add “vs” to the “Include” filter.

Matching terms report for "lectric, rad power, ride1up" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

You can see from the above that you can write many different comparison articles comparing various models.

Scrolling down the list, I can see there is also an excellent opportunity to write a comparison of Trek vs. Specialized ebikes. 

Detail screenshot of "trek vs specialized ebike" KD and volume, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

You can scale this by replicating this “vs.” approach for other bike brands.

If we want to understand the questions people are searching for, we can use Keywords Explorer to identify these as well. 

To do this, remove all filters and click on the toggle to select Questions. 

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Matching terms report for "ebike" filtered by Questions, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

In terms of monetization for the ebikes niche, you can use display ads or go directly to the manufacturers. For accessories, you can use Amazon Associates. 

Examples of some of the higher percentage ebike affiliate programs are below:

  • St3ike, 10% commission, 90-day cookie 
  • Trek, 4% commission, 30-day cookie
  • Lectric, 3% commission, 30-day cookie

With 70% of U.S. households owning pets, this is a popular topic. And if you own a pet already, then this will be straightforward for you to write about.

Below is the current breakdown of pet ownership in the U.S., according to the 2021–2022 APPA National Pet Owners Survey.

Breakdown of pet ownership in the U.S.

Although it may seem like a good idea to write about cats and dogs, these topics have been covered many times before and will be extremely competitive. 

Instead, I’d advise writing about lesser-known pets. For example, let’s take a look at “reptile,” which is further down the list.

If we put “reptile” into Keywords Explorer, go to the Matching terms report, and set the KD to 0–20, we can see some of the lowest competition keywords to target in this niche.

Matching terms report for low-KD, reptile-related keywords, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

We can see that “reptile basics” has a monthly search volume of 5,000 and 0 KD, which will be an excellent opportunity for a niche site to capitalize on due to its very low KD. 

Another keyword that stands out here is “reptile terrarium.” Although it has a higher KD than “reptile basics,” it has a higher Traffic Potential.

Details for "reptile terrarium," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

If we click on the keyword “reptile terrarium” and then scroll down to the bottom of the page, we can use the SERP overview in Keywords Explorer to see what the SERP looks like for this keyword.

SERP overview for "reptile terrarium," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Although many of the sites in the above list have high Domain Rating (DR) scores, we can see that the seventh result has a lower DR, which can mean it’s possible for a targeted niche site to rank for this keyword on the SERP.

Let’s return to the Matching terms report by clicking back in our browser. Let’s then add the word “best” to the “Include” filter to help us identify some commercial intent keywords for this topic.

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Matching terms report for "reptile" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

By adding “best” as a qualifier, we can see people are searching for incubators, hygrometers, and other reptile accessories related to this topic—the best bit is these keywords also have low KD scores and decent Traffic Potential.

OK, let’s take this one step further now that we have established this is a workable niche. 

Let’s imagine you created your site on a wider topic than just reptiles and went for the broader “exotic pets” niche. The advantage of this approach is that there will likely be more Traffic Potential and that we won’t limit our niche site to just reptiles.

If we add “exotic pets” as our seed keyword in Keywords Explorer and then go to the Matching terms report, we can see a bunch of opportunities here: roughly 9,000 potential keywords we can target.

Matching terms report for "exotic pets," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Let’s take “legal exotic pets” from the above and dig deeper into this keyword phrase. 

To do this, open a new instance of Keywords Explorer and type in “illegal pets, legal pets” in the search bar. Then click on the Matching terms report and add an “Include” filter with the word “in” in it. 

Matching terms report for "illegal pets, legal pets" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Using this search method, we can see people are using Google to understand the legality of certain pets in different U.S. states. 

As there are 50 states in the U.S., this gives you at least 50 pages of potential content on “exotic pets” to write about for your niche site.

In terms of monetization for the pets niche, you can use display ads and Amazon Associates. Or if you want, you can recommend vet care options, as they will typically have higher commission rates. 

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I have provided some examples of higher commissions within the pets niche below:

In 2021, the NGF reported that there were more golf courses nationwide than Starbucks or McDonald’s stores in the U.S. That’s a lot of golfers—meaning a lot of people are Googling golf-related questions.

Let’s look at how we can discover these opportunities within the golf niche using Ahrefs. 

If we plug in the seed keyword “golf” into Keywords Explorer, go to the Matching terms report, and hit the Questions toggle, we can see just how many questions golfers are searching for—just over 230,000.

Matching terms report for "golf" filtered by Questions, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Answering these questions and running display ads is a perfectly legitimate way to build a niche site. But as there’s no way to answer them all, it’s probably best to narrow our search and focus on something more specific.

With 16,000 golf courses in the U.S., one potential option is to create a site about the best golf courses.

If we plug the seed keyword “golf course, golf courses” into Keywords Explorer, set the KD to 0–20, and add an “Include” filter containing the words “best” and “in,” we can see many low-KD searches that we can capitalize on.

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Matching terms report for "golf course, golf courses" with "Include" filters applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

It’s likely we’ll attract tens of thousands of monthly visitors to a niche site about this alone.

In terms of monetization, you can use Amazon Associates. But to get higher commissions, you should check out the programs below:

According to Statista, in the U.S. in 2021, approximately 1.85 million acoustic guitars were sold and 1.49 million electric guitars were sold. This makes the guitar niche attractive for affiliate marketers.

Let’s take a closer look at the guitar niche in Ahrefs. 

If we enter our seed keyword “guitar” in Keywords Explorer and set the KD to 0–20, we can see there is much potential within this niche. In the results, there are millions of monthly searches for thousands of guitar-related keywords.

Matching terms report for "guitar" with a KD filter isolating the low-difficulty keywords, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Let’s hone in on all the chord-related keywords, as there seem to be two examples in the top 10 with this particular keyword pattern.

We can isolate these keywords using an “Include” filter containing the word “chord.”

Matching terms report for "guitar" with "Include" filter and "KD" filter applied, Via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

We can see there is a goldmine of low-competition informational keywords here. If you want to expand this idea further, you can look at Google’s People Also Ask questions to give you more inspiration to build out these topics. 

For example:

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PAA result for "bm chord," via Google

But what if we want to write more commercially led content that compares one guitar to another?

We can do this in Keywords Explorer by changing our “Include” filter from “chord” to “vs,” which will allow us to see all the comparison queries people are searching for. 

Matching terms report for "guitar" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

With this list, we can see there is a lot of potential to compare different guitar types against each other. Two of the examples in the above image also have 0 KD, meaning that these keywords can potentially be easy to rank for in Google.

In terms of monetization, you can use display ads or Amazon Associates, which pays a commission of ~3%. For higher commissions, you can try the following programs:

Pressure washers may not be the sexiest niche out there. But according to grandviewresearch.com, the global market is worth $1.8 billion. 

Let’s start by using “pressure washer” as our seed keyword in Keywords Explorer and head to the Matching terms report.

Matching terms report for "pressure washer," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

We can see from the above that there are many brands within the top keywords. 

Let’s try to isolate the brand comparison keywords.

If we add an “Include” filter in Keywords Explorer that contains “vs,” we can see that there are over a thousand keywords we can potentially target.

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Matching terms report for "pressure washer" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

We can see that brands feature heavily in this list, so let’s change “vs” to “review” in our “Include” filter to isolate the top brand review keywords.

Matching terms report for "pressure washer" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

We can see that a lot of these keywords have low KD scores under 10 and also reasonable search volumes.

Now let’s say we want to take a closer look at the informational searches within this niche.

The quickest way to do this is to remove the “Include” filter and click on Questions.

Matching terms report for "pressure washer" filtered by Questions, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Once we have done this, let’s say we want to understand how many questions in this niche have a featured snippet in Google. We can do this by clicking the “SERP features” dropdown, selecting Featured Snippet, and clicking Apply.

Matching terms report for "pressure washer" filtered by featured snippets on SERP features, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

For monetization in this niche, you can use Amazon Associates. For higher commission options, you can try these:

With vinyl record sales now surpassing CD sales and over $1 billion of vinyl records sold in the U.S. in 2021, it seems that the vinyl record has once again refused to die. 

According to the data from the RIAA, the vinyl records market is set to keep increasing in value exponentially.

Let’s use Keywords Explorer to find turntable keyword phrases that include the word “best” in them.

To do this, type “turntable” into the search bar and add the word “best” to the “Include” filter.

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Matching terms report for "turntable" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

The keyword “best turntable under 500” seems to indicate that people are probably searching for turntables “under” many different price points. 

To see whether this is true, let’s add “under” to our “Include” filter.

Matching terms report for "turntable" with "Include" filters applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

It’s clear from the above that people are searching for turntables under many different price points. We can also see that these keywords have KD scores of 6 or under. This presents lots of opportunities to rank for “best” keywords at different price points within this niche.

In terms of monetization, you can use Amazon Associates, or you can use some higher percentage affiliate programs:

  • 1 By One, 16% commission, 30-day cookie
  • Gemini, 7% commission, 30-day cookie

Home gym equipment became incredibly popular during the pandemic. And its popularity has exploded since then. 

According to Statista, the wholesale fitness equipment market is worth an incredible $6.42 billion.

Let’s identify some keyword opportunities for this niche in Keywords Explorer. 

Let’s start by using “home gym” as our seed keyword.

Matching terms report for "home gym," via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Using this search, we can see over 38,000 potential keywords to target here.

Let’s hone in on the “best” keyword, as it appears twice in our list. We can do this by adding the word “best” as an “Include” filter.

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Matching terms report for "home gym" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

We can now see the emergence of a “best X for Y” pattern, so let’s add a second “Include” filter containing the word “for” to isolate these searches further.

Matching terms report for "home gym" with "Include" filters applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

From these two “Include” filters, we now have a list of over a thousand keywords we can use as inspiration for articles on our home gym niche site.

We have now successfully isolated the “best X for home gym” searches. Let’s take a different approach and look at one of the trends in the above list in more detail. 

We can see in the screenshots above that the keyword “machine” is a recurring theme with high search volume. 

The average price of a gym machine is likely to be higher than some standard gym equipment, so it can potentially bring in higher affiliate commissions.

Let’s type in a list of all the gym machines we can think of, copy and paste them into Keywords Explorer, go to the Matching terms report, and add “best” to the “Include” filter.

Gym machines list with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

If we look at the general pattern of searches above, we can see two key exceptions that stand out from the general pattern of searches: “best smith machine exercises” and “best smith machine workouts.” These are both informational searches where people are looking for the best ways to use the Smith machine.

Let’s dig into these searches a bit further using Keywords Explorer

To do this, we can add “exercise*, workout*” as an “Include” filter. (Remember that adding the asterisks here allows us to search for plural and non-plural variations simultaneously.)

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Gym machines keyword list with "Include" filters applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Now we can see that we have over a thousand keywords that target mainly informational queries with low-KD scores.

We can also see that the Smith machine is a focus area for these types of search queries, so building out a substantial section on this topic in your niche site is probably a good idea.

With the home gym niche, you can monetize it by recommended products you have reviewed. Or you can recommend online personal trainers or simply use display ads. 

You can also use Amazon Associates. But if you want something with a higher commission, you may want to check out the following programs:

According to a report from McKinsey, 87% of employed Americans would work flexibly if they could and 58% said they work remotely part of the time.

This means that 92 million people in the U.S. will require supplies to work from home. That’s a big market that is hard to ignore. 

Let’s say you created a niche site around your favorite work-from-home products. What would you review? Wireless headsets? Laptops? 

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Let’s look at the opportunity for these types of products in Keywords Explorer.

Start by entering “wfh, work from home, working from home” in the search bar. Then go to the Matching terms report and add an “Include” filter containing the word “best.” 

Matching terms report for work from home–related keywords with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

We can see from the above that the results aren’t 100% focused on products. So to refine the results further, we can hone in on product searches by adding “for” to the “Include” filter.

Matching terms report for WFH-related keywords with "Include" filters applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Once we have done this, we can get a good idea of what products people want when working from home: headsets/headphones, computers/laptops, and monitors.

Using these “Include” filters in Ahrefs, we can quickly locate all the “best X for Y” keywords. These keywords are likely a great starting point for a “working from home” themed website.

Let’s dig into the keyword “headphones” a bit more and look at all the Questions surrounding this topic.

Matching terms report for "headphones" filtered by Questions, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

We can see that there is a huge opportunity to create content around how to “pair” different brands of wireless headphones.

Let’s add an “Include” filter containing the word “pair” to isolate phrases that include this keyword. 

Matching terms report for "headphones" with "Include" filter applied, via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

We can see a lot of low-KD opportunities and over 7,000 keywords to create content around this single topic.

This type of content can be helpful for someone who is working from home for the first time and is about to join a remote meeting or someone who has just bought a new set of wireless headphones.

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This niche can be monetized simply through display ads and Amazon Affiliates. I have provided a few other affiliate program examples below, which you can use to monetize your site.

For example:

  • Logitech, 5–10% commission, 30-day cookie
  • Razer, 3–10% commission, 30-day cookie
  • HP, 1% commission, 30-day cookie 

Final thoughts

Finding a great niche isn’t as hard as it seems.

Writing about a topic you love can definitely make things easier. But you should also analyze the data carefully before you choose your niche—this is where Ahrefs can really help.

With monetization, you don’t have to stick to just Amazon Associates, AdSense, or Ezoic—but these can be good places to start. Going directly to the manufacturers will almost always earn you a higher commission rate.

I’ve outlined 10 ideas here, but there are countless other ones out there. I hope this list provides inspiration for your next niche site.

Got more questions? Ping me on Twitter. 🙂

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SEO

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

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

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All the best things about Ahrefs Evolve 2024

Hey all, I’m Rebekah and I am your Chosen One to “do a blog post for Ahrefs Evolve 2024”.

What does that entail exactly? I don’t know. In fact, Sam Oh asked me yesterday what the title of this post would be. “Is it like…Ahrefs Evolve 2024: Recap of day 1 and day 2…?” 

Even as I nodded, I couldn’t get over how absolutely boring that sounded. So I’m going to do THIS instead: a curation of all the best things YOU loved about Ahrefs’ first conference, lifted directly from X.

Let’s go!

OUR HUGE SCREEN

CONFERENCE VENUE ITSELF

It was recently named the best new skyscraper in the world, by the way.

 

OUR AMAZING SPEAKER LINEUP – SUPER INFORMATIVE, USEFUL TALKS!

 

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GREAT MUSIC

 

AMAZING GOODIES

 

SELFIE BATTLE

Some background: Tim and Sam have a challenge going on to see who can take the most number of selfies with all of you. Last I heard, Sam was winning – but there is room for a comeback yet!

 

THAT BELL

Everybody’s just waiting for this one.

 

STICKER WALL

AND, OF COURSE…ALL OF YOU!

 

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There’s a TON more content on LinkedIn – click here – but I have limited time to get this post up and can’t quite figure out how to embed LinkedIn posts so…let’s stop here for now. I’ll keep updating as we go along!



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