SEO
What Is Enterprise Content Marketing? Strategies You Need To Be Successful
Enterprise content marketing involves creating and sharing relevant content to attract, engage, and retain an organization’s target audience.
When enterprise content marketing is done well, it can drive tons of leads, conversions, and, ultimately, revenue. In addition, it can help with things like brand perception and awareness.
There’s a misconception that big enterprise websites rank for everything. They definitely have an advantage, but they still have to figure out what content to create and put in the work to rank.
Even with all the advantages that enterprise companies have related to the strength of their domain, as well as personnel and resources, they struggle to use SEO effectively to get more traffic.
Scale, complexity, politics, lack of strategy, lack of processes, and red tape make content marketing for enterprise companies more difficult than it is for smaller companies.
Here’s how to approach enterprise content marketing.
When starting out, you may not have any additional resources, funding, or even the personnel you need. You might have to bootstrap a program and even write the content yourself.
That’s okay! The point is to make progress. Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Personnel & resources
If you can at least get together a base team of an SEO, a writer, and an editor, then the process will be smoother. Also, try to have some folks with domain knowledge that you can interview before writing the content or have them review the content so you have expert insights.
As you make progress, you will get more resources and fill in more gaps. Eventually, you’ll probably have more writers, SEOs, editors, project managers, designers, content strategists, and developer resources. In my experience, it’s often easier and cheaper to bring in external resources as you’re scaling than it is to bring in someone in someone for a full-time role.
You’ll also want to make sure that your team has access to any enterprise SEO tools they need to be successful, like Ahrefs.
Have a place to publish your content
The main thing you need to do is make progress, and that means that content should be in a place that’s easy for you and your team to publish. A blog is where most people will start. If you have to have a bunch of custom design work or developers to create every page, it’s going to be hard to make progress.
Making your content marketing successful takes a lot of work. Here are some things you can do.
Create new content
There are many different types of content you can create, but with limited resources, it’s usually best to start out with informational content and videos since they provide high ROI. After you’ve got more resources, you can create things like virtual events, courses, e-books, case studies, white papers, podcasts, or even magazines or books.
The sales process for enterprise companies is typically longer. Many companies want to skip top-of-the-funnel and informational content and focus more on the end-of-funnel traffic that converts. In doing so, they narrow their pipeline and give their competitors opportunities to be seen as experts instead of them.
Starting with bottom-of-the-funnel content makes sense, but eventually, you’ll want to create that top-of-the-funnel content and expand your pipeline.
When creating content, you have to find a process that works best for your company and content creators. That will change depending on who is creating your content.
What content should you create?
I like to start with my competitor’s top pages rather than starting research with a list of keywords. If you export and combine this data, you end up with a list of your competitor’s most successful content, and you can start with the content you know already works and is likely driving value to a competitor. I talk about my process for this in our article on how to create great content.
Every team I ever worked with, whether product-focused or marketing-focused, loved to see this data. You may want to keep track of your content creation in Google Sheets or Airtable.
Alternatively, you can use the Content Gap tool to find these opportunities, but you may see some repeated opportunities because of similar keywords. We will update this to add clustering and help reduce this extra noise.
For now, you may want to export the keywords from the Content Gap tool, paste them into Keywords Explorer, and go to the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab. This should give you actual content opportunities you may not be covering.
SEOs creating content
For SEOs writing the content, I recommend you talk to the experts or interview them to get their insights. They may have papers, presentations, podcasts, or webinars you can repurpose. The sales team is another great source of information. I’ll also look at what people search around a topic and what other pages cover.
A lot of organizations create copycat content, but that’s just more content that’s the same as what is already out there. This isn’t future-proof. I encourage you to do better. If you can put in a bit more work and add to the information that already exists, your content will be more successful.
Writers creating content
You likely have a team of people who create the content, and you may be able to empower them to do this process themselves.
One of the things that I liked to use with content teams was a card-sorting exercise. Take the data you’re looking at around what people search and what the top pages talk about, and put them on index cards.
Have your content writers organize this in a way that makes sense to them. They’re going to be grouping your data into topics and subtopics and coming up with the content sections or pages they should write.
This helps train people to do this task themselves, and there’s no right or wrong answer as to how it should be organized. You can also show how top pages cover this information as confirmation that it works. As long as you’re writing about what people are looking for, you’re likely to be successful.
Alternatively, your SEOs can provide your writers with an easy-to-digest outline or content brief that covers what should be talked about in the article.
To see how each author or team is doing, you can create Portfolios. This will help identify star performers or writers or teams that might need some additional help.
Experts creating content
If your employees want to write content, you need to find a way to empower them to do so. These are your experts, and while the content they create may require some editing, the insights from these employees are valuable and may not be anywhere else.
If your experts don’t have the time to write content, another option is to interview them or have them review the content you create. Most people are usually happy to give quick insights verbally, which you can then use in your content.
Improve existing content
Making your existing content better can lead to quick wins. Here are some things you can look for.
Content with declining traffic
Apply a filter for “Traffic: Declined” in the Top pages report in Site Explorer and set your time period for the last 6 months or a year. Take a look at pages that lost traffic to see which ones are important to you and that you think you can improve.
Low-hanging fruit
One common way to prioritize content improvements is to check for low-hanging opportunities, like pages ranking in positions 4-15 for their main keyword. You might be able to quickly improve these pages’ content to rank higher and get more traffic. Use Google Search Console or the Organic Keywords report in Site Explorer to find pages that fit the bill.
Optimize for featured snippets
For informational content, targeting featured snippets can skyrocket you to the top of the SERPs.
Here’s how to find the easiest opportunities:
- Go to Ahrefs’ Site Explorer
- Enter your domain
- Go to the Organic keywords report
- Filter for keywords in positions #1–5
- Filter for keywords that trigger featured snippets “where target doesn’t rank”
- Look for keywords where your page is missing the answer, then add it
This is arguably the most important section that you can write if you want to rank for informational queries. You can see what is already eligible for a snippet and the kind of things that these snippets mention, along with why one may be better than another. Now you just have to make something that’s better.
Here’s an example: For “how to create content,” the main snippet is from inc.com:
If you append “-inc.com” to your search, you’re removing this site from the results and can see the second eligible featured snippet from hubspot.com:
You can repeat this process, removing more sites from the results to see more eligible featured snippets. Also, you can glean insights into what it takes to get featured snippets and figure out why one may be considered better than another.
For some head terms that are more informational in nature, you may have to refine the query as “what is [head term]” for this to work.
Translate successful content
Most enterprise companies operate in many countries and in many different languages, and their enterprise SEO teams will have to work on international SEO. If you have content that’s working well in one language, it’s likely going to work well in another language as well. You should translate successful content for those other languages
We’ve had success with this at Ahrefs despite allocating minimal resources to this process. It’s one of the areas where I expect massive growth as we start to focus on it more.
Create branded content, sometimes
You’re probably going to run into content that is too brand-focused, too product-focused, or even too keyword-focused. People will ask you to rank for terms with pages they control that don’t align with search intent. A good example is someone wanting to “sprinkle some keywords” into their product page to rank for an informational term.
You can use the “Identify intents” feature in Keywords Explorer to show the main intent of each term and the percentage of traffic to each result. A product page for “enterprise content management” isn’t likely to rank for this query as the main pages ranking are informational intent.
Sometimes, there may be one product page ranking for terms like this where you have a shot at ranking, but it’s usually the most popular product in that position.
There are times you may want to optimize and even create content for branded terms, but this shouldn’t be your usual strategy. Nor should you “sprinkle some keywords” into brand-or-product-focused pages to try to rank for informational terms. These pages may be full of marketing or sales jargon and not have the content you actually need to rank.
Many enterprise websites get a lot of their overall traffic from branded searches, and they may not rank well for unbranded terms. Branded traffic is a good thing. It’s high-quality and converts well, but you should be getting it even without SEO help.
The exceptions to that may be for terms related to companies that were acquired or products that were renamed. You may still need content or documentation to help you keep traffic for those terms and direct people to new versions of the product.
Syndicate content
Content syndication is when one or more third-party sites republish a copy of content that originally appeared elsewhere. It frequently happens with news content, although, to be honest, any popular site is going to have scrapers and enterprise sites may have a paid syndication strategy.
There are a lot of benefits to syndication, including increased reach. Check out our article on content syndication to learn more about it and how to follow best practices.
Redirect relevant old content
In many cases, your old URLs have links from other websites. If they’re not redirected to the current pages, then those links are lost and no longer count for your pages. It’s not too late to do these redirects, and you can quickly reclaim any lost value and help your content rank better.
Here’s how to find those opportunities:
I usually sort this by “Referring domains.”
Build and improve internal links
I’ve always found internal links to be a powerful way to help pages rank higher. Even these links may be difficult to get in an enterprise environment.
Sometimes different people are responsible for different sections of the website or even different pages, which can make internal linking time-consuming.
On top of the political hurdles, the process for internal linking can be a bit convoluted. You either have to know the site well and read through various pages looking for link opportunities or follow a process that involves a lot of scraping and crawling to find opportunities.
At Ahrefs, we’ve made this simple, scalable, and accessible so anyone can find these opportunities with our tool in Site Audit. We look at what your pages are ranking for and suggest links from other pages on your site that talk about those things.
I’d also recommend watching out for opportunities to use better link anchor text. It’s common for page creators to overuse generic link anchor text such as “learn more,” “read more,” or “click here.” You can look for usage of this kind of generic copy in the Internal anchors report in Site Explorer.
Create “vs” pages
Creating content that compares you against competitors can be difficult to create in an enterprise environment because of all the legal hurdles. I still think it’s useful to push for these kinds of pages so that you can control the narrative.
There are ways you can do this without having giant tables comparing each feature. Those are always biased anyway. For instance, on our vs page, we show what users think of us and talk about the quality of our data and unique features.
This page has done well for us, and I believe we will create more pages like it in the future.
Create free tools
If you can create free tools around your product or data, you can use it as a lead-gen tactic for your main products.
We use this strategy at Ahrefs, and some of our most trafficked pages are from free tools. We even created a bunch of free writing tools, which we are starting to monetize.
Create programmatic content
If you have the ability to create good pages programmatically using your data, it can be a great way to scale quickly.
We had some success with a small amount of effort by re-using components to create “SEO for x” pages, where x is different types of business. Most of these are ranking well already, but at some point I believe we will put in more effort and pull more data to make these pages even better.
We’re working on some additional programmatic plays that showcase our data even more, and I expect will drive a lot of leads.
Create video content
Video content can work extremely well for businesses. Sam Oh drives tons of leads for Ahrefs.
Ahrefs YouTube has over 500k subscribers with less than 300 published videos. Many of those videos have over 1 million views!
In my past jobs, I’ve always treated videos the same way I would blog content and structured the talking points around the things people are searching for and want to know. This worked extremely well, even for industries where people were convinced that folks in the industry didn’t watch videos.
In enterprise organizations, it can be hard to find your way around, navigate the political landscape, and compete for resources. Don’t expect miracles right away. It can take a while to get traction. Here’s how to make progress.
Show off your successes
After you have some initial success, show that off repeatedly. Do the whole dog and pony show. Eventually, you’ll find advocates for your work and teams who want to work with you to repeat that success. Replicate your success with other teams or business units and show them off, too. Build momentum one win at a time, and eventually most of the organization will be bought in.
Also, try to get involved with any training initiatives the company may have. This way, you can showcase the success you’ve had and educate others on what to do at the same time.
When doing reporting and showcasing wins, try to show revenue generated or as close as you can get to revenue. Revenue, SQLs, MQLS, etc. It’s what executives care about, and you’re more likely to get attention.
Get promoted
As you move up higher in the org chart, it gets easier to make progress. There will be more money available, and it’ll be easier to get buy-in from executives. At a point, things typically start to get centralized, and you may see things like Centers of Excellence (CoE). As standards and processes are written, it’s easier to have everyone follow best practices. This should lead to more success and an easier time getting more buy-in. Every company seems to go through similar transitions in their SEO maturity.
Create enterprise SEO scorecards
Another tactic you can use to get things moving is to create scorecards for different product teams or different business units to showcase how each is improving across different metrics. This can help you identify areas that need additional help or may need some persuasion to get things moving. I describe how to do this in more detail in the Enterprise SEO metrics & reporting article.
Integrate with other teams
One way to get more buy-in is to show people the bigger picture. Communicate with other teams to integrate with them and then show everyone how that leads to more business success.
For instance, the paid team would love to re-market to the people who landed on your organic pages. The social team can help promote your content. If you can show execs the whole picture of how teams can help each other to grow the business, then you’ll get buy-in and resources easier. You can also ask them to help promote your content on their channels.
Align with business goals
It can also help if you can align with business goals. Pushing content around products or services the business wants to grow is a great way to get attention. Many companies have some kind of top 20 / top 50 project where they have specific things they want to push and grow. Start there, get the attention of the folks at the top, and you’ll have an easier time growing your enterprise content marketing program.
Final thoughts
There’s so much at stake in enterprise SEO and so many opportunities. Just keep pushing and building momentum one win at a time. When a company and its people finally get behind SEO, they can dominate an industry.
If you have any tips, enterprise SEO experiences you’d like to share, or questions, let me know on X or LinkedIn.
SEO
How to Revive an Old Blog Article for SEO
Quick question: What do you typically do with your old blog posts? Most likely, the answer is: Not much.
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. Many of us in SEO and content marketing tend to focus on continuously creating new content, rather than leveraging our existing blog posts.
However, here’s the reality—Google is becoming increasingly sophisticated in evaluating content quality, and we need to adapt accordingly. Just as it’s easier to encourage existing customers to make repeat purchases, updating old content on your website is a more efficient and sustainable strategy in the long run.
Ways to Optimize Older Content
Some of your old content might not be optimized for SEO very well, rank for irrelevant keywords, or drive no traffic at all. If the quality is still decent, however, you should be able to optimize it properly with little effort.
Refresh Content
If your blog post contains a specific year or mentions current events, it may become outdated over time. If the rest of the content is still relevant (like if it’s targeting an evergreen topic), simply updating the date might be all you need to do.
Rewrite Old Blog Posts
When the content quality is low (you might have greatly improved your writing skills since you’ve written the post) but the potential is still there, there’s not much you can do apart from rewriting an old blog post completely.
This is not a waste—you’re saving time on brainstorming since the basic structure is already in place. Now, focus on improving the quality.
Delete Old Blog Posts
You might find a blog post that just seems unusable. Should you delete your old content? It depends. If it’s completely outdated, of low quality, and irrelevant to any valuable keywords for your website, it’s better to remove it.
Once you decide to delete the post, don’t forget to set up a 301 redirect to a related post or page, or to your homepage.
Promote Old Blog Posts
Sometimes all your content needs is a bit of promotion to start ranking and getting traffic again. Share it on your social media, link to it from a new post – do something to get it discoverable again to your audience. This can give it the boost it needs to attract organic links too.
Which Blog Posts Should You Update?
Deciding when to update or rewrite blog posts is a decision that relies on one important thing: a content audit.
Use your Google Analytics to find out which blog posts used to drive tons of traffic, but no longer have the same reach. You can also use Google Search Console to find out which of your blog posts have lost visibility in comparison to previous months. I have a guide on website analysis using Google Analytics and Google Search Console you can follow.
If you use keyword tracking tools like SE Ranking, you can also use the data it provides to come up with a list of blog posts that have dropped in the rankings.
Make data-driven decisions to identify which blog posts would benefit from these updates – i.e., which ones still have the chance to recover their keyword rankings and organic traffic.
With Google’s helpful content update, which emphasizes better user experiences, it’s crucial to ensure your content remains relevant, valuable, and up-to-date.
How To Update Old Blog Posts for SEO
Updating articles can be an involved process. Here are some tips and tactics to help you get it right.
Author’s Note: I have a Comprehensive On-Page SEO Checklist you might also be interested in following while you’re doing your content audit.
Conduct New Keyword Research
Updating your post without any guide won’t get you far. Always do your keyword research to understand how users are searching for your given topic.
Proper research can also show you relevant questions and sections that can be added to the blog post you’re updating or rewriting. Make sure to take a look at the People Also Ask (PAA) section that shows up when you search for your target keyword. Check out other websites like Answer The Public, Reddit, and Quora to see what users are looking for too.
Look for New Ranking Opportunities
When trying to revive an old blog post for SEO, keep an eye out for new SEO opportunities (e.g., AI Overview, featured snippets, and related search terms) that didn’t exist when you first wrote your blog post. Some of these features can be targeted by the new content you will add to your post, if you write with the aim to be eligible for it.
Rewrite Headlines and Meta Tags
If you want to attract new readers, consider updating your headlines and meta tags.
Your headlines and meta tags should fulfill these three things:
- Reflect the rewritten and new content you’ve added to the blog post.
- Be optimized for the new keywords it’s targeting (if any).
- Appeal to your target audience – who may have changed tastes from when the blog post was originally made.
Remember that your meta tags in particular act like a brief advertisement for your blog post, since this is what the user first sees when your blog post is shown in the search results page.
Take a look at your blog post’s click-through rate on Google Search Console – if it falls below 2%, it’s definitely time for new meta tags.
Replace Outdated Information and Statistics
Updating blog content with current studies and statistics enhances the relevance and credibility of your post. By providing up-to-date information, you help your audience make better, well-informed decisions, while also showing that your content is trustworthy.
Tighten or Expand Ideas
Your old content might be too short to provide real value to users – or you might have rambled on and on in your post. It’s important to evaluate whether you need to make your content more concise, or if you need to elaborate more.
Keep the following tips in mind as you refine your blog post’s ideas:
- Evaluate Helpfulness: Measure how well your content addresses your readers’ pain points. Aim to follow the E-E-A-T model (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness).
- Identify Missing Context: Consider whether your content needs more detail or clarification. View it from your audience’s perspective and ask if the information is complete, or if more information is needed.
- Interview Experts: Speak with industry experts or thought leaders to get fresh insights. This will help support your writing, and provide unique points that enhance the value of your content.
- Use Better Examples: Examples help simplify complex concepts. Add new examples or improve existing ones to strengthen your points.
- Add New Sections if Needed: If your content lacks depth or misses a key point, add new sections to cover these areas more thoroughly.
- Remove Fluff: Every sentence should contribute to the overall narrative. Eliminate unnecessary content to make your post more concise.
- Revise Listicles: Update listicle items based on SEO recommendations and content quality. Add or remove headings to stay competitive with higher-ranking posts.
Improve Visuals and Other Media
No doubt that there are tons of old graphics and photos in your blog posts that can be improved with the tools we have today. Make sure all of the visuals used in your content are appealing and high quality.
Update Internal and External Links
Are your internal and external links up to date? They need to be for your SEO and user experience. Outdated links can lead to broken pages or irrelevant content, frustrating readers and hurting your site’s performance.
You need to check for any broken links on your old blog posts, and update them ASAP. Updating your old blog posts can also lead to new opportunities to link internally to other blog posts and pages, which may not have been available when the post was originally published.
Optimize for Conversions
When updating content, the ultimate goal is often to increase conversions. However, your conversion goals may have changed over the years.
So here’s what you need to check in your updated blog post. First, does the call-to-action (CTA) still link to the products or services you want to promote? If not, update it to direct readers to the current solution or offer.
Second, consider where you can use different conversion strategies. Don’t just add a CTA at the end of the post.
Last, make sure that the blog post leverages product-led content. It’s going to help you mention your products and services in a way that feels natural, without being too pushy. Being subtle can be a high ROI tactic for updated posts.
Key Takeaway
Reviving old blog articles for SEO is a powerful strategy that can breathe new life into your content and boost your website’s visibility. Instead of solely focusing on creating new posts, taking the time to refresh existing content can yield impressive results, both in terms of traffic and conversions.
By implementing these strategies, you can transform old blog posts into valuable resources that attract new readers and retain existing ones. So, roll up your sleeves, dive into your archives, and start updating your content today—your audience and search rankings will thank you!
SEO
How Compression Can Be Used To Detect Low Quality Pages
The concept of Compressibility as a quality signal is not widely known, but SEOs should be aware of it. Search engines can use web page compressibility to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords, making it useful knowledge for SEO.
Although the following research paper demonstrates a successful use of on-page features for detecting spam, the deliberate lack of transparency by search engines makes it difficult to say with certainty if search engines are applying this or similar techniques.
What Is Compressibility?
In computing, compressibility refers to how much a file (data) can be reduced in size while retaining essential information, typically to maximize storage space or to allow more data to be transmitted over the Internet.
TL/DR Of Compression
Compression replaces repeated words and phrases with shorter references, reducing the file size by significant margins. Search engines typically compress indexed web pages to maximize storage space, reduce bandwidth, and improve retrieval speed, among other reasons.
This is a simplified explanation of how compression works:
- Identify Patterns:
A compression algorithm scans the text to find repeated words, patterns and phrases - Shorter Codes Take Up Less Space:
The codes and symbols use less storage space then the original words and phrases, which results in a smaller file size. - Shorter References Use Less Bits:
The “code” that essentially symbolizes the replaced words and phrases uses less data than the originals.
A bonus effect of using compression is that it can also be used to identify duplicate pages, doorway pages with similar content, and pages with repetitive keywords.
Research Paper About Detecting Spam
This research paper is significant because it was authored by distinguished computer scientists known for breakthroughs in AI, distributed computing, information retrieval, and other fields.
Marc Najork
One of the co-authors of the research paper is Marc Najork, a prominent research scientist who currently holds the title of Distinguished Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. He’s a co-author of the papers for TW-BERT, has contributed research for increasing the accuracy of using implicit user feedback like clicks, and worked on creating improved AI-based information retrieval (DSI++: Updating Transformer Memory with New Documents), among many other major breakthroughs in information retrieval.
Dennis Fetterly
Another of the co-authors is Dennis Fetterly, currently a software engineer at Google. He is listed as a co-inventor in a patent for a ranking algorithm that uses links, and is known for his research in distributed computing and information retrieval.
Those are just two of the distinguished researchers listed as co-authors of the 2006 Microsoft research paper about identifying spam through on-page content features. Among the several on-page content features the research paper analyzes is compressibility, which they discovered can be used as a classifier for indicating that a web page is spammy.
Detecting Spam Web Pages Through Content Analysis
Although the research paper was authored in 2006, its findings remain relevant to today.
Then, as now, people attempted to rank hundreds or thousands of location-based web pages that were essentially duplicate content aside from city, region, or state names. Then, as now, SEOs often created web pages for search engines by excessively repeating keywords within titles, meta descriptions, headings, internal anchor text, and within the content to improve rankings.
Section 4.6 of the research paper explains:
“Some search engines give higher weight to pages containing the query keywords several times. For example, for a given query term, a page that contains it ten times may be higher ranked than a page that contains it only once. To take advantage of such engines, some spam pages replicate their content several times in an attempt to rank higher.”
The research paper explains that search engines compress web pages and use the compressed version to reference the original web page. They note that excessive amounts of redundant words results in a higher level of compressibility. So they set about testing if there’s a correlation between a high level of compressibility and spam.
They write:
“Our approach in this section to locating redundant content within a page is to compress the page; to save space and disk time, search engines often compress web pages after indexing them, but before adding them to a page cache.
…We measure the redundancy of web pages by the compression ratio, the size of the uncompressed page divided by the size of the compressed page. We used GZIP …to compress pages, a fast and effective compression algorithm.”
High Compressibility Correlates To Spam
The results of the research showed that web pages with at least a compression ratio of 4.0 tended to be low quality web pages, spam. However, the highest rates of compressibility became less consistent because there were fewer data points, making it harder to interpret.
Figure 9: Prevalence of spam relative to compressibility of page.
The researchers concluded:
“70% of all sampled pages with a compression ratio of at least 4.0 were judged to be spam.”
But they also discovered that using the compression ratio by itself still resulted in false positives, where non-spam pages were incorrectly identified as spam:
“The compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6 fared best, correctly identifying 660 (27.9%) of the spam pages in our collection, while misidentifying 2, 068 (12.0%) of all judged pages.
Using all of the aforementioned features, the classification accuracy after the ten-fold cross validation process is encouraging:
95.4% of our judged pages were classified correctly, while 4.6% were classified incorrectly.
More specifically, for the spam class 1, 940 out of the 2, 364 pages, were classified correctly. For the non-spam class, 14, 440 out of the 14,804 pages were classified correctly. Consequently, 788 pages were classified incorrectly.”
The next section describes an interesting discovery about how to increase the accuracy of using on-page signals for identifying spam.
Insight Into Quality Rankings
The research paper examined multiple on-page signals, including compressibility. They discovered that each individual signal (classifier) was able to find some spam but that relying on any one signal on its own resulted in flagging non-spam pages for spam, which are commonly referred to as false positive.
The researchers made an important discovery that everyone interested in SEO should know, which is that using multiple classifiers increased the accuracy of detecting spam and decreased the likelihood of false positives. Just as important, the compressibility signal only identifies one kind of spam but not the full range of spam.
The takeaway is that compressibility is a good way to identify one kind of spam but there are other kinds of spam that aren’t caught with this one signal. Other kinds of spam were not caught with the compressibility signal.
This is the part that every SEO and publisher should be aware of:
“In the previous section, we presented a number of heuristics for assaying spam web pages. That is, we measured several characteristics of web pages, and found ranges of those characteristics which correlated with a page being spam. Nevertheless, when used individually, no technique uncovers most of the spam in our data set without flagging many non-spam pages as spam.
For example, considering the compression ratio heuristic described in Section 4.6, one of our most promising methods, the average probability of spam for ratios of 4.2 and higher is 72%. But only about 1.5% of all pages fall in this range. This number is far below the 13.8% of spam pages that we identified in our data set.”
So, even though compressibility was one of the better signals for identifying spam, it still was unable to uncover the full range of spam within the dataset the researchers used to test the signals.
Combining Multiple Signals
The above results indicated that individual signals of low quality are less accurate. So they tested using multiple signals. What they discovered was that combining multiple on-page signals for detecting spam resulted in a better accuracy rate with less pages misclassified as spam.
The researchers explained that they tested the use of multiple signals:
“One way of combining our heuristic methods is to view the spam detection problem as a classification problem. In this case, we want to create a classification model (or classifier) which, given a web page, will use the page’s features jointly in order to (correctly, we hope) classify it in one of two classes: spam and non-spam.”
These are their conclusions about using multiple signals:
“We have studied various aspects of content-based spam on the web using a real-world data set from the MSNSearch crawler. We have presented a number of heuristic methods for detecting content based spam. Some of our spam detection methods are more effective than others, however when used in isolation our methods may not identify all of the spam pages. For this reason, we combined our spam-detection methods to create a highly accurate C4.5 classifier. Our classifier can correctly identify 86.2% of all spam pages, while flagging very few legitimate pages as spam.”
Key Insight:
Misidentifying “very few legitimate pages as spam” was a significant breakthrough. The important insight that everyone involved with SEO should take away from this is that one signal by itself can result in false positives. Using multiple signals increases the accuracy.
What this means is that SEO tests of isolated ranking or quality signals will not yield reliable results that can be trusted for making strategy or business decisions.
Takeaways
We don’t know for certain if compressibility is used at the search engines but it’s an easy to use signal that combined with others could be used to catch simple kinds of spam like thousands of city name doorway pages with similar content. Yet even if the search engines don’t use this signal, it does show how easy it is to catch that kind of search engine manipulation and that it’s something search engines are well able to handle today.
Here are the key points of this article to keep in mind:
- Doorway pages with duplicate content is easy to catch because they compress at a higher ratio than normal web pages.
- Groups of web pages with a compression ratio above 4.0 were predominantly spam.
- Negative quality signals used by themselves to catch spam can lead to false positives.
- In this particular test, they discovered that on-page negative quality signals only catch specific types of spam.
- When used alone, the compressibility signal only catches redundancy-type spam, fails to detect other forms of spam, and leads to false positives.
- Combing quality signals improves spam detection accuracy and reduces false positives.
- Search engines today have a higher accuracy of spam detection with the use of AI like Spam Brain.
Read the research paper, which is linked from the Google Scholar page of Marc Najork:
Detecting spam web pages through content analysis
Featured Image by Shutterstock/pathdoc
SEO
New Google Trends SEO Documentation
Google Search Central published new documentation on Google Trends, explaining how to use it for search marketing. This guide serves as an easy to understand introduction for newcomers and a helpful refresher for experienced search marketers and publishers.
The new guide has six sections:
- About Google Trends
- Tutorial on monitoring trends
- How to do keyword research with the tool
- How to prioritize content with Trends data
- How to use Google Trends for competitor research
- How to use Google Trends for analyzing brand awareness and sentiment
The section about monitoring trends advises there are two kinds of rising trends, general and specific trends, which can be useful for developing content to publish on a site.
Using the Explore tool, you can leave the search box empty and view the current rising trends worldwide or use a drop down menu to focus on trends in a specific country. Users can further filter rising trends by time periods, categories and the type of search. The results show rising trends by topic and by keywords.
To search for specific trends users just need to enter the specific queries and then filter them by country, time, categories and type of search.
The section called Content Calendar describes how to use Google Trends to understand which content topics to prioritize.
Google explains:
“Google Trends can be helpful not only to get ideas on what to write, but also to prioritize when to publish it. To help you better prioritize which topics to focus on, try to find seasonal trends in the data. With that information, you can plan ahead to have high quality content available on your site a little before people are searching for it, so that when they do, your content is ready for them.”
Read the new Google Trends documentation:
Get started with Google Trends
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Luis Molinero