I recently encountered a SEO test that tried to check if the compression ratio affects the rankings. It seems that there may be some who believe that higher compression ratios are correlated with lower rankings. Understanding compressibility in the context of SEO requires reading both the original source on compression ratios and the research document itself before drawing conclusions to know whether or not it is a SEO myth.
Search engine compression web pages
Compressibility, in the context of search engines, refers to the amount of web pages can be compressed. The narrowing of a document in a zip file is an example of compression. Search engines compress indexed web pages because it saves space and leads to faster treatment. This is something that all search engines do.
Website and guest suppliers compress web pages
Compression of web pages is a good thing because it helps to search for robots in progress, which in turn sends the signal to Googlebot that it will not analyze the server and it is normal to grasp even more pages for indexing.
Compression accelerates websites, offering site visitors a high quality user experience. Most web hosts automatically allow compression because it is good for websites, site visitors and also good for web hosts because it records bandwidth. Everyone wins with the compression of the website.
High compression levels are correlated with spam
Researchers from a search engine discovered that highly compressible web pages were correlated with low quality content. The study called Spam, fucking spam and statistics: use a statistical analysis to locate spam web pages (Pdf) was made in 2006 by two of the main researchers in the world, Marc Najork and Dennis Fetterly.
Najork is currently working at Deepmind as a distinguished researcher. Fetterly, software engineer at Google, is an author of many important research articles related to research, content analysis and other related subjects. This research document is not just any research document, it is important.
What the 2006 research document shows is that 70% of web pages that are compressed at a level of 4.0 or more tended to be low quality pages with a high level of use of redundant words. The average compression level of the sites was around 2.0.
Here are the averages of the normal web pages listed by the search document:
- 2.0 compression ratio:
The most common compression ratio in the data set is 2.0. - 2,1 compression ratio:
Half of the pages have a compression ratio of less than 2.1 and half have a compression ratio above. - 2,11 compression ratio:
On average, the compression report of the pages analyzed is 2.11.
It would be an easy way to filter obvious content spam, so it makes sense that they do this to eliminate heavy content spam. But the weedkiller spam is more complicated than simple solutions. Search engines use several signals because it results in a higher level of precision.
The 2006 researchers said that 70% of the sites with a compression level of 4.0 or more were spam. This means that the other 30% were not spam sites. There are always aberrant values in statistics and that 30% of non-SPAM sites explain why search engines tend to use more than one signal.
Do search engines use compressibility?
It is reasonable to assume that search engines use compressibility to identify obvious with heavy hand. But it is also reasonable to assume that if the search engines use it, they use it with other signals in order to increase the accuracy of the measurements. No one knows with certainty if Google uses compressibility.
Impossible to determine if Google uses compression
This article concerns the fact that there is no way to prove that a compression report is a SEO myth or not.
Here is why:
1. If a site triggered the compression report 4.0 plus the other spam signals, what would happen is that these sites would not be in the search results.
2. If these sites are not in search results, there is no way to test the search results to see if Google uses the compression report as a spam signal.
It would be reasonable to assume that the sites with high compression reports of 4.0 have been removed. But we don’t do it know It is not a certainty. So we cannot prove that they have been deleted.
The only thing we know is that there is this research document that is written by distinguished scientists.
Compressibility is not something to fear
Compressibility may or may not be a SEO myth. But one thing is quite certain: it is not something including publishers or SEOs that publish normal sites should worry. For example, Google Canoniecie double pages and consolidates the PageRank signals on the Canonicalized page. This is completely normal with dynamic websites such as electronic commerce web pages. Product pages can also compress at a higher rate because there may not be a lot of content. It’s good too. Google is able to classify them.
Something like compression takes abnormal levels of heavy spam tactics to trigger them. Then consider that spam signals are not used in isolation due to false positives, it is probably not unreasonable to say that the average website does not have to worry about compression ratios.
Star image by Shutterstock / Roman Samborskyi
