Google Leak Exposes Hidden Ranking Secrets!

Internal Documentation from Google's engineering team was recently leaked and it proves that Google lies I know big shock right by now you've probably already heard a bit about this so I'm going to focus on the key learnings and what we need to change as a result of what we know now the short story is that a mistake made caused some internal Google search API documentation to get published publicly to a repository now Google s fixed this mistake uh it's gone now but because it was out there we now have access to what it said so what's in the docs well approximately 14,000 ranking features for one thing now these features aren't all necessarily ranking factors per se as we talk about with SEO but many of them actually are also in the documents we don't see how these features are actually scored or even if they're really used in the Google search algorithm so basically this is a snapshot of a bunch of stuff that Google has in its search API but it doesn't actually tell us how this stuff is used so why does this even matter well in short it proves to us for one thing that there are things that are in the search algorithm that Google has explicitly told us many times are not part of the search algorithm and while there's been a lot of Suspicion or honestly most people I just don't believe anything Google says because the expectation is that they're probably lying this does give us a little bit clearer direction as to what they may actually be doing so let's now dive into some of the specific findings and what we should actually do based on this new information the first thing is Click data Google has told us explicitly many times that they don't use user click data which articles they actually choose when they get to the serp to determine where things should actually rank within the serp now I have a history of playing by the rules and generally focus on creating helpful content and trying to follow the guidelines that Google gives us but even I never bought this one it honestly doesn't make any sense of course user Behavior should impact rankings that's how social networks all work the things that get clicked on the things that get actual engagement are the things that social media sites want to continue to promote because it keeps people using those social media sites so it makes sense that in a search algorithm you would want to continue to promote the articles that get the most engagement that people click on the most and they get good clicks well now we see that Google is tracking all sorts of different types types of clicks not just did they click but how long did they click did they click on it and stay in the article for a while or did they pogo stick as we call it where they go into an article pretty quickly bounce back out and click on another article from that Ser because the first one didn't give them what they wanted now you could argue yeah but sometimes sometimes I do that sometimes I I just want to look at like three different articles yeah that's pretty normal behavior but when you see that aggregate over a lot of time when you see somebody clicks on your article leaves and clicks to another article but doesn't leave quickly and that happens by thousands of people over time that should tell the search algorithm that yeah that the article that they left it didn't help them the way that the next article did well basically now we see for sure that Google is tracking this and if they're tracking it they are very likely using it in the search algorithm something that also was kind of revealed as a part of this is that user click behavior and their engagement in certain types of content as well as which articles they choose to click on and which they choose not to this Behavior not only is a ranking Factor but it can completely outweigh all other traditional SEO factors so what does that mean for us one it means that whatever search query it is that we're trying to rank for we need to make sure that we're doing a really good job of answering that search query in a complete enough way that people don't need to go to another resource but we also want to create engaging content that keeps people on the page longer that gets people scrolling through the page and engaging with the page the more they engage with your content the better so if you have a page that's got a video that people click on and then they watch the video or it's got a tool on it like a calculator or maybe an infographic maybe you have some sort of decision tree so that you help people through a decision-making process basically whatever we can do to keep people engaging with our content and to answer their question thoroughly enough that they don't have to go back out to the serp and look at other resources from the search results the better our content should do over time now that doesn't help if your content never gets clicked on in the first place because Google's never showing it and we're going to address that in some of these other findings that brings me to number two and this is maybe one of the smaller ones there were actually I mean like I said 14,000 so there are a lot of little Revelations and one of those is that small websites um actually there's a label for small personal websites that Google uses now we don't know if Google's using that to promote or demote small websites but I think we actually know because small personall looking websites have almost all been demoted in the last little while so what does that mean don't let your website look like a small personal blog it needs to look like a business if you have not yet taken the steps that I showed I literally demonstrated in this video um a while back quite a while back it's time to do that now these steps several of them are going to help establish your website as more like a legitimate business rather than making it look like a personal blog along those same lines Google has told us for a long time there's no sandbox we don't take new sites and just like don't let them rank for a while and while it's true that brand new content can get indexed pretty quickly and can show up in the serps there actually is now a tracking for host age so they may actually be tracking and even demoing websites that are pretty new so one build that into your expectations and two maybe make sure that at least some of the content that you're writing about on your website is targeting fairly low competition keywords that's going to help you rank anyway so if you're the only only one that's got an answer to that specific search query when someone asks that question your article's the one that's going to rank as long as it's been indexed by Google so that's the thing with a lot of these factors or a lot of these signals here is that they're signals and they're going to impact the waiting but if your content is relevant then it's still going to have a chance to rank if there's not a lot of other relevant content that said we've seen a lot of content that's not as relevant outranking content that's far more relevant because Google seems to have demoted these websites and so we're going to have to focus a lot on branding and other stuff too you can't just write answering low competition search queries all right number three this is along the lines of Click data but Google is also using Chrome data so users that use Google Chrome no matter what search engine they're using even though obviously by default most are using Chrome the the actual click data the user Behavior the engagement that they do on specific websites that's all impacting the algorithm for example when some somebody goes to your website Google's going to see which links on your website that get clicked on the most and that's going to impact which links show up under your primary domain in the serers so if somebody searches income School income school is going to show up but then you're going to see these other links to other pages on the website well those are because those are some of the links that get clicked on the most when people go to probably the homepage or really anywhere on the website notice that I also have a Google my business listing and I also have a product listed there and I have reviews I've actually solicited some reviews from Members I've asked them actually in general just hey if you want to leave a review leave a review um on Google and a couple of other places and that actually helps because it makes it clear to Google that this isn't a personal blog it's an actual Business website but back to the point at hand the links that people click on not only determine which links show up right there in the serup when people search you know the brand but it can also impact how a lot of those pages on your website Rank and so if you can get people to engage with your website in a lot of different ways and the more people click through to lots of different pages the better those pages should perform in Google search the next finding was content freshness so having fresh upto-date content on your website is going to help your website as well as that specific content to rank better now this doesn't mean you need to be constantly adding new blog posts to your website like every day and it also doesn't mean that a specific publishing schedule like dropping an article a week or three a week or One A Day is particularly important but what it does mean is make making sure that your content is always up to date and accurate is valuable and making little changes to an article here and there is going to update the last updated date for those articles on your website one thing I'd recommend doing is displaying the last updated date in your articles if you need to choose I would choose last updated over the published date you can display both if if you want to but at least show the the latest updated date in general I also wouldn't recommend showing no date at all we've said that in the past a long time ago because the age of content didn't really matter that much in the past especially on topics that are particularly Evergreen and recognize that all of these ranking factors are going to have increased and decreased importance depending on the type of search that it is for search queries where the answers really are very Evergreen the age is probably not going to matter very much but a lot of other search queries the age of the content is going to be important so if you have articles that you wrote three years ago you should probably go look through those articles and just make sure everything in them is still accurate and make any tweaks that need to be made to that article then when you display the latest updated date it's going to be clear to users as well as to Google because that date will show up should show up in needs to show up in your sit map it'll show up on the page itself and in the metadata for the article and that's going to make it clear to Google that it's been updated recently all right the fifth finding that we're going to talk about today is eat and brand recognition direct eat signals are important some of these are things that we talk about in the video that I mentioned earlier um you know having a business address on your website or an address at all on your website and contact information um having just other signals that show that you're a legitimate business but also other signals that show that you have authoritativeness within your industry that type of stuff now when we when I talk about eat I'm usually talking about things that extend beyond just the direct signals to Google I'm often usually talking about things that are going to establish you as an authority and give you recognition and Rapport within the industry but when a lot of other seos talk about eat they're talking specifically about things that Google can measure and so there's maybe a little bit of Disconnect there those more Technical and measurable eat signals are important but maybe not quite as important or it's unclear how important they really are however the most important thing you can do is establish a brand you see brand recognition people knowing who you are and choosing your content over other people's content because they know who you are both because of your content that's on the web and on Google as well as content that they've seen that they've heard of you off of Google like being interviewed in a podcast maybe something that I've talked about before or because of your YouTube channel or because of other social media or just because you participate in your industry in a normal and natural way when people recognize who you are and they choose your content over other people's content all of that click data from Google Chrome all that click-through data from people using Google and choosing you over the other content that may outrank you all of those are the signals that are going to make the hugest impact not just the like most enormous impact possible on how you perform in Google search going forward as well so I heard it said and I this is the way I'm seeing it at least right now it's kind of reversed from what it used to be it used to be you could create content get found on Google and use that to get a bunch of traffic and it would establish you as an authority and you could use that to grow social media channels and whatever else sell products now it's like the other way around now it's like we need to use social media to find people and use all of that to build recognition and Rapport so that then Google will be able to trust us and then all of a sudden we'll start getting a lot more organic traffic from Google so if and I'm hearing this from other seos as well if it turns out that the typical eat signals that Google can actually measure are maybe not as important as we thought they were but brand recognition and user click interaction and being able to recognize you as who you are if that's the more important signal then maybe an approach like industry Outreach and participating in your industry would be more valuable than just fishing for backlinks I feel like I've heard that before the biggest takeaway from all this stuff from Google um in my opinion I'm I'm agreeing here now with Rand fishkin uh Rand wrote up a really good analysis of this and a lot of this is based off of work that was done by Mike I'll link to both of their articles in the description of this video because their analysis it's really good but what Rand said I'm going to read this here he says if there was one universal pie pce of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic so he's saying you want to do better in SEO you want to get more organic traffic from Google he says it would be build a notable popular well-recognized brand in your space outside of Google search it's good advice also kind of sounds familiar wherever I've heard that before um I'm just going to say right now unequivocally I agree so what are we going to change well I've outlined some specific recommendations here in this video but in terms of my approach to Google and to marketing well what am I going to do different now based on this leak that I wasn't already doing a few weeks ago basically nothing the approach that we're taking and the approach that I'm teaching is the approach that you need to be taking as well if you want to do well in Google as well as just be successful as a marketer on the internet so that's something we're going to be talking about about a lot on this channel going forward it's what we've been talking about lately on this channel going forward so if you want to learn how to succeed at business on the web you should subscribe to this Channel and you should check out the other videos that we've already made on this channel and I'll see you next time

Channel: Income School

Views: 2,204

Keywords: internet marketing, passive income, website, seo, content marketing, affiliate marketing, wordpress, youtube creators

Id: 2YKEOy-HBi0

Length: 15min 16sec (916 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 11 2024