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

April 19, 2011 by Adam Sherk

eHow logoeHow 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:

DomainRank on SEMRush List
of eHow Google
Competitors
Common Keywords
with eHow
1nytimes.com46107049
2usatoday.com6280881
3cnn.com7669325
4huffingtonpost.com14241303
5bbc.co.uk16236867
6guardian.co.uk16436729
7businessweek.com19232584
8dailymail.co.uk19532169
9abcnews.go.com21029848
10latimes.com21929164
11telegraph.co.uk23128262
12examiner.com27124859
13engadget.com27524726
14sfgate.com27724564
15cbsnews.com29223374
16forbes.com30022209
17washingtonpost.com30321909
18gizmodo.com31221464
19usnews.com33619915
20wsj.com33819763
21time.com37418046
22foxnews.com38517636
23timesonline.co.uk41216523
24patch.com41316498
25mashable.com42516143
26bnet.com42816132
27boston.com44415643
28npr.org46815037
29arstechnica.com50413922
30independent.co.uk52713411
31reuters.com56312585
32slate.com69910624
33techcrunch.com71710417
34indiatimes.com7579863
35cbslocal.com7779609
36oregonlive.com7799594
37bizjournals.com7879540
38chicagotribune.com8718640
39businessinsider.com9178281
40csmonitor.com10707189
41post-gazette.com11516653
42aolnews.com13166003
43dallasnews.com13685822
44gawker.com15105282
45newsweek.com15785092
46readwriteweb.com16234968
47sun-sentinel.com20814015
48timesunion.com20894004
49economist.com27773072
50msnbc.com36572357

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:

ehow nytimes - SEMRush common keywords

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:

eHow - SEMRush keyword competitors

Related posts:

  1. eHow and Mahalo: How Many Keyword Variations is Too Many?
  2. The Most Common Causes of Duplicate Content on News Media Sites
  3. Real-time Search Optimization for News Sites
  4. The Top News Sites on Blekko
  5. The Most Buried News Sites on Digg

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About Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is an SEO and PR consultant helping publishers with digital strategy and audience development, including enterprise SEO, public relations and social media marketing.

Adam is VP SEO and Digital Strategy for Define Media Group.

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