SEO
The Top 3 Google Ranking Factors That Really Matter
Celebrate the Holidays with some of SEJ’s best articles of 2023.
Our Festive Flashback series runs from December 21 – January 5, featuring daily reads on significant events, fundamentals, actionable strategies, and thought leader opinions.
2023 has been quite eventful in the SEO industry, and our contributors produced some outstanding articles to keep pace and reflect these changes.
Catch up on the best reads of 2023 to give you plenty to reflect on as you move into 2024.
If only SEO were as simple as having a list of ranking factors that Google applies to its algorithm.
If only SEO were as simple as Google having one algorithm.
If only every niche and location were ranked in the same way.
Long gone are the days when search engines operated on a basic level, where keyword stuffing and a volume of links were obviously direct factors that impacted ranking. Oh, and there was only one algorithm to worry about.
Over the last 25 years, SEO has become an increasingly complex and nuanced discipline.
Ranking factors differ by the vertical and the keyword. YMYL rankings are handled differently from how ecommerce transactional queries are ranked, and local search is different again.
There is only one certainty with SEO: the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know.
But, we do know that there are some factors or signals that Google considers important for ranking pages.
Download our Ranking Factors for 2023 ebook here.
The “Google 200 Ranking Factors” Myth
Before we list important factors and signals for ranking, we need to talk about the mythical list of 200 ranking factors that Google allegedly uses.
Do a Google search for “ranking factor,” and you will see in the search engine results pages (SERP) plenty of titles that mention “200 ranking factors” from some well-known blogs.
Most likely, the number 200 originated as a PR attempt by Google to portray its algorithm as complex and having multiple factors. And then it stuck. The only known citation of “200” is from a speech by Matt Cutts at PubCon in 2009.
As we said above, Google and ranking have evolved exponentially over the last 25 years to a point where there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of factors and machine learning overlays.
What Yandex Revealed About Ranking Factors
The Yandex ranking factors leak of January 2023 revealed Yandex uses around 690 ranking factors, give or take.
At the time, this was an insight into how a major search engine applied factors and signals for ranking.
In a direct conversation, Dan Taylor, an expert on Russian search engines, said both Yandex and Google share a number of similarities in how they try to index and rank websites: “They both have the same data points to work with; on-page content, links, meta-data, mobile-friendliness, and user interactions such as SERP clicks and user behaviour.”
He went on to say: “Both search engines also make use of AI for parts of their ranking systems (such as Vega), but have differences in how they weight certain signals, such as backlinks and users clicking on results in the SERPs, and some of these are more easily manipulated than others in comparison to Google.”
Taylor thinks, in theory, that pages can be optimized for both search engines in the same way without compromising performance. That would mean the Yandex leak could offer insights into ranking on Google.
Factors, Systems, And Signals
Whenever Google documentation is updated – or Gary Illyes, John Mueller, or Danny Sullivan comment – SEO professionals obsess over the meaning.
This is an issue for Google and the SEO industry at large, because SEO pros often look too deeply at the wrong thing and lose focus on what really matters. Nothing seems to be held to more scrutiny than ranking factors.
SEO professionals are becoming fixated on the semantic differences between factors, systems, and signals.
When documentation was updated to remove page experience from the Systems page, Google was forced to put out this statement on X (Twitter): “Ranking *systems* are different than ranking *signals* (systems typically make use of signals). We had some things listed on that page relating to page experience as “systems” that were actually signals. They shouldn’t have been on the page about systems. Taking them off didn’t mean we no longer consider aspects of page experience. It just meant these weren’t ranking *systems* but instead signals used by other systems.”
As it turns out, page experience is still a ranking factor (see below).
Digging into the semantics, Google has two official pages that relate to ranking factors:
A guide to Google Search ranking systems:
“Google uses automated ranking systems that look at many factors and signals about hundreds of billions of web pages and other content in our Search index to present the most relevant, useful results, all in a fraction of a second.”
“To give you the most useful information, Search algorithms look at many factors and signals, including the words of your query, relevance and usability of pages, expertise of sources, and your location and settings. The weight applied to each factor varies depending on the nature of your query.”
Gary Illyes covered the differences between factors, signals, and systems during an Ask Me Anything session at PubCon (September 2023), where he said, “The main difference is just language.”
The easiest way to differentiate between system and signal is to say: Google’s ranking systems can be thought of as the machine learning layers that are applied to refine search results. Ranking signals influence the systems and ranking.
SEO expert Ammon Johns clarified this in a direct message: “Not all things that are classed as signals will be used in any one system. Many things that Google classifies as signals may not be applicable to a particular query, or may be weighted differently to that of another query. For example, even Google’s most famous of all signals, PageRank, isn’t used in Local Search at all.”
The Google “How Search Works” page talks about “key factors that help determine which results are returned for your query.”
On this page, the main factors are summarized as:
- Meaning.
- Relevance.
- Quality.
- Usability.
- Context.
If you can understand the fundamental approach that Google takes, then distracting yourself with semantics is not important. Following a common sense approach to the end goal for the end user is a much more effective and long-term strategy.
Basically, Google is driven by wanting to provide the best search results it can so that it has a market-leading product. It’s a business. Once you understand this, you understand the fundamental concept of SEO.
That said, here are the fundamental ranking factors that should all be considered for SERP visibility.
The 3 Ranking Factors That Every SEO Pro Should Focus On
1. High-Quality Content
The first stage of ranking is to understand the user’s query.
The second stage is to match the query to the content on a page.
From How Search Works: “Our systems analyze the content to assess whether it contains information that might be relevant to what you are looking for.”
As long as your site is technically sound enough to be crawled and rendered, quality content continues to be the number one ranking factor.
Content is key not just for ranking, but also for user experience and conversion.
Gary Illyes from Google summarizes this by saying: “Without content it literally is not possible to rank. If you don’t have words on page you’re not going to rank for it. Every site will have something different as the top 2 or 3 ranking factors.”
The internet is literally built from pages of content.
But what is high-quality content? In short, it can best be defined as content that follows E-E-A-T signals, and it demonstrates:
- Experience.
- Expertise.
- Authoritativeness.
- Trustworthiness.
Read more about E-E-A-T below.
Integral parts of content are the keywords and words on the page. There are theories circulating that keywords are now obsolete and not needed anymore to rank. But, on a fundamental level, keywords do still matter.
As Google says, “The most basic signal that information is relevant is when content contains the same keywords as your search query. For example, with web pages, if those keywords appear on the page, or if they appear in the headings or body of the text, the information might be more relevant.”
A page must clearly identify what it is about to avoid any ambiguity and to be ranked.
Pedro Dias, a former Googler, explained in a direct conversation: “It’s not that original ranking factors like keywords are obsolete, they are the cornerstone on which we build. It’s just as important as always that these fundamentals are applied and done well.”
Pedro went on to say: “Google has introduced machine learning that is applied on top of the foundations so that they can provide results that take into account far more nuanced intents for queries.”
Google is striving to always surface the best results, so machine learning systems have been developed as part of the move towards parsing natural language queries. Google can understand the difference between “cheat” as a disingenuous person and “cheat” as a way to game a system (as in cheat code). An example Pedro highlighted that Gary Illyes once used.
We can’t mention content and keywords without talking about entities, which Google uses to better understand topics. This article explains in depth why it’s essential to understand entities in SEO.
As explained by Ammon Johns: “Search engines have placed more emphasis on semantic search and entities. For the simplest kind of example, search for ‘History of Munchen’ and not only will Google understand the misspelling of MÜNCHEN, but it will almost certainly mostly show results with the more popular ‘Munich’ keyword in the titles and snippets.”
The systems that have the most impact on ranking content are as follows:
Helpful Content System
Launched in 2022, Google’s helpful content system is focused on providing the best content to the user.
Google’s motivation is for content to demonstrate real-world experience, which circles back to providing the best experience for the reader: “more content by people, for people.”
The system is being updated constantly, and in 2023, we have been through several iterations of updates.
Google states: “The helpful content system aims to better reward content where visitors feel they’ve had a satisfying experience, while content that doesn’t meet a visitor’s expectations won’t perform as well.”
A few of the guidelines for helpful content, which all underline E-E-A-T, include:
- Don’t stray from your main topic.
- Demonstrate first-hand experience.
- Don’t combine multiple topics on one site.
RankBrain
Launched in 2015, RankBrain is one of Google’s machine learning systems that can connect words to concepts and helps Google understand the intent of a search query.
This is part of the rank refining where Google will try to return the most relevant results to a query. It also allows Google to return results for queries with no previous record of searches.
Before RankBrain, Google didn’t understand synonyms and would return literal interpretations of a word. From Google: “…before we had advanced AI, our systems simply looked for matching words. For example, if you searched for “pziza” – unless there was a page with that particular misspelling, you’d likely have to redo the search with the correct spelling to find a slice near you…Now, with advanced machine learning, our systems can more intuitively recognize if a word doesn’t look right and suggest a possible correction.”
BERT
In 2018, BERT created waves in the SEO industry as a significant update for Google that was reported to impact about 10% of search queries at the time.
The system understands how combinations of words can have different meanings, especially stop words. This makes even so-called stop words relevant in search when they contribute to the meaning of a query.
From Google: “BERT was a huge step change in natural language understanding, helping us understand how combinations of words express different meanings and intents.”
Multitask Unified Model (MUM)
In 2021, at Google IO, MUM was announced as a system to take things a step further by being multimodal, which allows it to take information from text, images, and possibly video.
MUM is not applied as a ranking system across all verticals, as Google said: “While we’re still in the early days of tapping into MUM’s potential, we’ve already used it to improve searches for COVID-19 vaccine information.”
It would appear that the main application is going to be for search that can contain text and images in Google Lens.
Google states: “As we introduce more MUM-powered experiences to Search, we’ll begin to shift from advanced language understanding to a more nuanced understanding of information about the world… MUM is capable of both understanding and generating language.”
Content Freshness
Caffeine was introduced in 2010 and was a move away from refreshing the entire index every few weeks. Google’s stated purpose for Caffein was to “analyze the web in small portions and update our search index on a continuous basis, globally.”
As the internet was rapidly expanding, in 2011, Google built on top of Caffeine and introduced “Freshness” by announcing: “…today we’re making a significant improvement to our ranking algorithm that impacts roughly 35 percent of searches and better determines when to give you more up-to-date relevant results for these varying degrees of freshness.”
Content freshness is not applied across all searches. It’s query-dependent and more critical for some niches and queries. For example, breaking news results, weather, or stock prices.
Most content will see some level of decay over time in search results if it isn’t updated. Ideas, concepts, products, and information are all constantly evolving, and users’ changing expectations are aligned with that.
Personalization & Locality
Although not concerned with quality of content, it’s worth mentioning here that on top of all the other rank refining is a layer of personalization, which takes into consideration user search history and user location.
For example, queries such as “best coffee shop” are considered location-dependent and will deliver a map of results based on your location. Some product queries are served by location to surface local suppliers.
Results for the same query can differ on each device, and knowing the motivation a user might have at a certain stage in their journey makes a difference in what results should be served in the SERPs.
As an example, the query “London Zoo” serves desktop results with an emphasis on research with video and image carousels, while the mobile SERP has a focus on tickets, directions, and location.
As John Mueller said: “If you’re searching on your phone then maybe you want more local information because you’re on the go. Whereas if you’re searching on a desktop maybe you want more images or more videos shown in the search results.”
When you do keyword research and create content, it is important to understand how personalization and locality will impact ranking and take this into consideration in your strategy.
E-E-A-T Is Not A Ranking Factor, But Is Important
Again, not a direct system for ranking, but Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness – E-E-A-T – is a critically important SEO concept that all content creators must take into account.
Google’s Search Quality Raters Guidelines used to be a closely guarded document at Google that was eventually leaked online. Google now openly publishes the document as an example of what its Quality Raters are looking for when they manually review websites.
E-E-A-T is part of the Google Quality Search Raters Guidelines and not so much a ranking factor, but it is a guideline.
E-E-A-T is made up of a series of refining signals that underline everything that Google has been trying to achieve with better user experience and fighting misinformation.
The concept is important for all niches, but especially for anyone in YMYL niches, such as finance or health, where the results can impact the user’s life significantly.
As mentioned above, quality content is a critical ranking factor, and there is no better blueprint to tell you how to achieve that than the E-E-A-T guidelines. Building a credible reputation as an expert within a field supports Google’s aim and provides a good user experience.
2. Page Experience
Page experience caused ripples in the community when it was removed from Google’s ranking systems page, which forced the Search Liaison team to say: “…As our guidance on page experience says in the first sentence: ‘Google’s core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience.’”
Page experience rolled out in 2021. Previously to this, Core Web Vitals (CWVs) had been emphasized as an important ranking factor.
CWVs then became part of something bigger in a collective group of ‘signals’ that make up page experience – essentially still a ranking factor, but part of a group of factors now known as ‘Page Experience.’
To understand why this matters is to understand everything that Google wants to achieve.
Google wants to deliver a good user experience. It does not reflect well on its product if it serves pages that take too long to load, don’t load well on certain devices, or are obscured by large ads that obstruct users from getting to the page.
Google says: “Google’s core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience.”
Page Experience is focused on four main signals:
- HTTPS.
- Page Speed.
- Mobile Friendliness.
- Core Web Vitals.
Page experience is important, but not the most critical factor. In some circumstances, it’s not applied to ranking but is more critical when there are two pages vying for a position.
As John Mueller explains: “If all of the content is very similar in the search results page, then probably using Page Experience helps a little bit to understand which of these are fast pages or reasonable pages with regards to the user experience and which of these are kind of the less reasonable pages to show in the search results.”
Google wants to deliver the best product on the market, and this is a critical part of SEO that has been overlooked. Focusing on Google’s motivation and working with this will get you better results for ranking than anything else.
3. Links
Ranking factors and links go hand in hand.
Since Google first launched, SEO professionals have been using links to manipulate rankings. And Google has been fighting link spam to try and improve its results.
Many SEO professionals think that links are being deprecated as a ranking factor. In a 2022 poll by Marie Haynes, 44% of SEOs pros who responded thought that link building was less effective now compared to a few years ago.
If we start by looking at why links have been important historically, in Google Founders Sergey Brin’s and Lawrence Page’s famous Stanford paper, links were given prominence as one of the main factors of ranking in a system that echoed the citations given to academic papers.
In the early days of Google, links quickly became the most leveraged spam technique for ranking. It took Google until 2012 and the legendary Penguin update to wipe out low-quality links, and it has been trying to downgrade the importance of links since this time.
Yet, the first time a Google representative said online that links were a ranking factor was in 2016. In a Q&A with Ammon Johns and others, Google Search Quality Senior Strategist Andrey Lipattsev said the top 3 ranking signals are “Content, Links, RankBrain.”
Skip forward to 2023; in an AMA at PubCon, Gary Illyes then gave a contradicting opinion to say that links are not a “top 3” ranking signal and haven’t been “for some time…there really isn’t a universal top 3.” Illyes went on to say, “It’s absolutely possible to rank without links.”
It’s worth considering that there are many reasons why Google would downplay the importance of links, such as to reduce link spam. Google is not going to outright claim that links are a surefire ranking factor if they can be so easily manipulated. Yes, it might be technically possible to rank without links, but more often, links do improve ranking.
In a direct message conversation, Ammon said in response to his 2016 video: “When Andrey Lipattsev responded with ‘Content, Links and RankBrain’, he was saying what matters is on-page, off-page, and how Google processes a query – which is something anyone should have already known. On that basis, no matter what Gary Illyes has said since, those are indeed the three essential factors still today.”
Apart from the flow of PageRank, one of the reasons that links are important is that Google typically finds pages by crawling, and it traverses pages via links.
This is why a page with no inbound or internal links can be difficult to rank, as it’s not found by Google via links in order to be crawled and indexed. The potential for the absence of links highlights the importance of submitting a sitemap, which tells Google what pages you want indexed.
Internal linking not only helps Google crawl and index all linked pages on your site – it also helps to interlink topic clusters, which is a valuable SEO content strategy.
What is important is that not all links are equal, and Google focuses on the quality of an individual link, not the volume of links.
John Mueller said: “The number of links may have been an important factor during the early days of PageRank, but Google prioritizes more helpful metrics to evaluate links today.”
Links do not have the same impact as they did in the early days when it was possible to rank with a high-volume of low-quality inbound links. Today, relevance and quality of link matter.
Good quality links do still have an influence on ranking, and a lot of SEO professionals would say they do still count.
At this point, we can confidently say that internal links and inbound links are still considered a ranking factor.
Google Ranking Factors Takeaway
The main thing to take away from this article is that ranking and SERP visibility are not straightforward applications of, “here is a list of ranking factors that we can work with.”
It’s one of the reasons why this industry is such an exciting and challenging space to work in.
All that said above, although there is not a clear set of Google ranking factors that you can follow, there are a number of factors and signals that are important to get right to achieve the best ranking you can.
Start by really understanding Google’s motivation and how it works. Then, you can start to understand how to shape your approach to content and SEO strategy in order to rank.
If you want to read more about ranking factors with a focus to prioritize facts and not speculation, then download a copy of Ranking Factors 2023 ebook.
In researching this article, the author spoke directly to Pedro Dias (former Google employee), Ammon Johns (SEO Pioneer), and Dan Taylor (Russian search engine and technical SEO expert). Many thanks to them for their input and expertise.
More resources:
Featured Image: Jeramey Lende/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
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