Which News Sites Have the Most Keywords in Common with eHow?

eHow is back in the news after claims it was hit hard by latest expansion of Google’s Panda update and subsequent denials from Demand Media. Articles like “How to Pour Water Into a Glass Cup” make it difficult to dispute eHow’s reputation as the poster child of content farms. But in terms of keyword targeting, how different is eHow from major news sites?

To get a rough idea I used SEMRush to look at the sites that have the most keywords in common with eHow. SEMRush’s “Competitors in Google” report ranks a site’s competitors by the number of keyword phrases for which both sites appear in Google’s organic search results.

So at a very basic level the more common keywords two sites share, the more similar they are at least in terms of keyword targeting.

I exported the first 10,000 results from SEMRush and went through the first few thousand looking for major news sites, primarily newspapers, national and local news organizations and online news sites. Then I added in a few major tech news sites to round out the list.

Here are the 50 news sites with the most keywords in common with eHow, according to SEMRush:

	Domain	Rank on SEMRush List of eHow Google Competitors	Common Keywords with eHow
1	nytimes.com	46	107049
2	usatoday.com	62	80881
3	cnn.com	76	69325
4	huffingtonpost.com	142	41303
5	bbc.co.uk	162	36867
6	guardian.co.uk	164	36729
7	businessweek.com	192	32584
8	dailymail.co.uk	195	32169
9	abcnews.go.com	210	29848
10	latimes.com	219	29164
11	telegraph.co.uk	231	28262
12	examiner.com	271	24859
13	engadget.com	275	24726
14	sfgate.com	277	24564
15	cbsnews.com	292	23374
16	forbes.com	300	22209
17	washingtonpost.com	303	21909
18	gizmodo.com	312	21464
19	usnews.com	336	19915
20	wsj.com	338	19763
21	time.com	374	18046
22	foxnews.com	385	17636
23	timesonline.co.uk	412	16523
24	patch.com	413	16498
25	mashable.com	425	16143
26	bnet.com	428	16132
27	boston.com	444	15643
28	npr.org	468	15037
29	arstechnica.com	504	13922
30	independent.co.uk	527	13411
31	reuters.com	563	12585
32	slate.com	699	10624
33	techcrunch.com	717	10417
34	indiatimes.com	757	9863
35	cbslocal.com	777	9609
36	oregonlive.com	779	9594
37	bizjournals.com	787	9540
38	chicagotribune.com	871	8640
39	businessinsider.com	917	8281
40	csmonitor.com	1070	7189
41	post-gazette.com	1151	6653
42	aolnews.com	1316	6003
43	dallasnews.com	1368	5822
44	gawker.com	1510	5282
45	newsweek.com	1578	5092
46	readwriteweb.com	1623	4968
47	sun-sentinel.com	2081	4015
48	timesunion.com	2089	4004
49	economist.com	2777	3072
50	msnbc.com	3657	2357

The New York Times tops the list with more than 100K keywords in common with eHow. It was #46 on the overall list of competitors. It should be pointed out however that with over 10 million nytimes.com pages in Google’s index the keyword overlap represents only 1% of NYT content.

USA Today and CNN also have considerably more common keywords than the other news sites on the list. The top 10 all share 29K or more keyword phrases with eHow.

What kinds of keywords do the news sites have in common with eHow?

Here are some of the terms shared with The New York Times:

Kind of an odd mix, but I spot checked the terms and both sites do surface in my Google results. In looking at the shared keywords for several sites, the commonality stems from both evergreen content on the news sites and news content on more general topics.

An important thing to point out however is that shared keywords do not necessarily mean shared quality. Just because some news sites are covering similar topics to eHow does not mean the quality of the content is the same.

That said Google is surfacing both the news sites and eHow for related search queries.

Which sites of any type share the most common keywords with eHow?

Here are the top 25 according to SEMRush: