What is Neighbor Content?

The term “neighbor content” that we frequently use in SEO refers to content that is either structurally or semantically related, even if not directly connected, and is found together in a specific section of the site.

For example; in Storyly.io we have glossary section with more than +60 pages with different subject in terms of context but they have same similar page structure, they are together in same URL pattern and they look exactly same to each other in terms of page design and coding, so even if those pages are not directly related to each other in terms of subject and context, they are considered as neighbor of each other in SEO.

What is the importance of neighbor contents?

The quality of a content in any section of your site, directly and indirectly affects the quality and rankings of another content in the same section.

Its because, Google divides the pages of websites into sections according to various features of the pages (code, design, page template, url pattern etc) and evaluates the rankings of these pages both on a page-based and section-based ranking metrics. Those page based and section based metrics are also considered “named” as query dependent ranking metrics and query independent ranking metrics.

Sectional quality signals and neighbor contents quality signals are directly part of those query independent ranking metrics.

A page’s rankings in search results are dependent on the query-related quality signals of that page, as well as directly on the query-independent quality signals. (This also depends on query intent and query features, some queries are highly dependent on query related features. Example: “How to” queries are highly dependent to on-page structures. If your competitor has better “how to” structure to explain things, they can surpass your page with even awful query independent signals.)

Still even if you have great how to content with proper content structure, proper design, page template, page coding, everything in a proper format you can have worst results compared to your competitors. Generally in those kind of situations, I always suggest that you should check your similar how to contents, your section quality (your neighbor content quality), your branding (which is query independent factor), topical authority (which is also another important query independent factor).

If your neighbor content lack page structure, proper content formatting, proper topical graphs, proper semantic structure etc. Then you can suffer from lack of topical authority and even if you have great page which is directly optimized to gain rankings in important “how to” queries, you can still have bad results.

Neighbor contents with direct influence on other contents which are in same cluster with the neighbor content, are of high importance to create topical authority and have higher rankings in SEO campaigns.

You cant have good results with bad neighbors just like you cant live proper life while living with a serial killer next to you.

So does neighbor contents can directly influence rankings of other pages?

In summary, yes. Its because as i said , Google use sectional data of the site to evaluate content rankings. Search engine checks quality of the sections which might be about semantic SEO (content network quality) or might be about UX, page speed performance of the section.

Google does that to understand site sections, their performance, their role their context and to optimize their sources while doing crawls on billions of page on the internet.

If you site section has really bad sectional structure (performance) then you can see that Google even decreases crawl limits for the URLs that published on that section.

A Case From Storyly.io

in Storyly according to this information, we started to optimize our glossary section which has quite bad rankings with enormous potential.

After all the optimizations that we had on glossary section (specifically on glossary) we’ve increased clicks by 2.020,69%. Below you can see the final data studio graph of Glossary section.

What we have done on Storyly?

First we started by deleting unimportant, contextually unrelevant contents from Storyly’s glossary section. The contextual, conceptual relevancy is mostly party of topical authority which is also another topic to talk but it is highly important to mention it here while optimizing sectional quality on any web site.

Before optimizing all the contents within a sectional cluster, you need to identify the unnecessary contents first. Because unrelevant contents not just waste your sectional quality potential but also crawling budget for your section. After identifying and removing conceptually unrelevant contents, we’ve created a sectional query template, sectional content template and we’ve started to optimizing all the contents inside glossary section.

We divided the Glossary contents into groups based on intents and reformatted the contents according to the intents they are relevant to.

Specifically to Storyly, due to lack of traffic from Glossary section in the past they did not focus on optimizing and increasing topical coverage of glossary contents. So at first we started by increasing topical graph quality and coverage of contents inside this cluster. We’ve added many queries as headings which is related to heading vectors, we’ve generated lots of questions and answered them with true entities and information.

We gave all the necessary information to users with glossary pages and tried to satisfy potential intents for the queries related to glossary pages. With the power of historical data search engines saw and understood that this site started to increase their topical coverage, content’s topical graph and quality, so rewarded us with many featured snippets and better rankings.

We’ve also made many optimizations directly to earn featured snippets on queries related to glossary pages. I see this tactic quite hacky and fruitful for any project with especially lack of brand power and backlink authority.

The Output of Optimizations:

While we were making updates on the pages we determined in the Glossary section of Storyly, we saw growth of more than 3x in the first month after optimizing approximately 20% or 25% of the glossary section. We’ve seen the biggest jump on the contents that we had optimized for growth, but also the contents that we had never touched and that had been performing very poorly before, started to jump 10–15 rankings quickly in a row.

Especially with Storyly’s glossary project, I once again saw the importance and impact of the quality of neighboring content and I continue to use this effect in all my SEO projects.