What the Google Leak Means for SEO

so it turns out that 2 and a half thousand internal Google documents giving some details about how Google search works have accidentally been published online this is by far the biggest official leak that the world has ever seen these documents give us incredible new insight into Google's ranking factors and potentially even more significant there appears to be what looks like concrete evidence that Google has been lying to the SEO Community for years is there has been some excellent technical analysis of what these documents contain so in this video I'm going to summarize my main takeaways and break it down to most importantly what you as a marketing manager business owner or SEO needs to do as a result of all of this information it has been quite a year for SEO now I think there are two main types of Revelation I guess from these documents the first is new information things that we didn't know Google was tracking or we didn't know were even possible to track the second type is myths and kind of SEO legends that many of us in the SEO Community have observed having an impact on ranking but Google has always flat out denied in some cases trying to discredit the people that pedal these myths well now many of them seem to be being confirmed now before we start digging into the insights there is an important caveat whilst this information appears to be legitimate we don't know for sure how much each of these metrics is being used we don't know the waiting of these factors and we don't know whether they're used in search results or in any other aspect of Google like document search although as we'll see some of the metrics and the variables inside them definitely imply that these are being used in web search this is documentation that Google seems to have accidentally published onto GitHub and it describes how to use the Google apis Now props the Rand fishkin who originally broke this and Mike King who spent an entire long weekend digging through all of this data and putting together some incredible analysis we'll come back to that later on okay so let's look at some of the new info that we've got from this league well some of it is about how Google search works one aspect in particular which is new to the community is the concept of a twiddler and the concept of a twiddler helps us understand how Google works and how different algorithm updates work so you have the main search ranking algorithm you type a query you get a set of results back back then you have twiddlers which are essentially reranking algorithms that adjust the ranking of the main algorithm some of these twiddlers seem to do things like limit the number of images that show up in a search but there's also a skin tone twiddler mentioned so why do we care well often when you hear Google talking about a new update like a panda update they will say we're going to stop rolling out the panda update and it's just going to become part of our core algorithm so what this probably means is that that update has has gone from being a twiddler to being rolled into the main algorithm and we'll come back to that idea a little bit later on next up we have the facts that Google understands who the author of a piece of content is now this might not sound that surprising but many in the world of SEO have been skeptical with the concept of eat or experience expertise authoritativeness and trust that Google can really ever tell who the author of a piece of content is yes you have an author by line and does Google really have a sort of defined concept of who an individual author of a piece of content is many people thought this just wouldn't be possible to measure well it looks like Google is measuring it we can see in this document that Google has a way of giving different entities topicality scores and one of the variables is whether this entity is the author of a piece of content so in other words is the author and Authority on the topic they're writing about we also see a fair few reference to demotions and promotions for example here is one called Authority promotion now of course we don't know what makes up that we don't know how heavily that's weighted or even what it is but there's another one called baby panda demotion another one called Ser demotion now these are thought to be sort of algorithmic penalties on certain websites or content and there has been some speculation since this has been launched that this reference to baby panda is actually referring to the helpful content update as many people thought the helpful content update had some similarities to the original Panda updates elsewhere there are hints that Google looks to serve content from around the same location as the Searcher and it tends to prioritize this over what it calls Global or even super Global content next let's talk about links now Mike King's excellent analysis of these docs included some information about indexing tiers so let's just explain that concept first of all before we dig into some of the specifics about links shown in these documents so Google essentially crawls and stores a version of the web right crawls through all the pages crawls through all the different websites and stores versions of these on the web so that when you search it goes and visits this index and pulls out the right Pages for you but not all pages not all websites are given the same treatment and in fact Google has three tiers of quality and Mike writes that the most important regularly upd ated and access content is stored in flash memory less important content is stored in solid state drives and irregularly updated content is stored in standard hard drives in the leaked documents we see suggestions that the value of a link is correlated to the tier of the page that that link appears on now of course we all know that getting high Authority links from very prominent websites is important but this is the first time we've seen a suggestion that actually those links might be more valuable if they're from sites which are more frequently updated well this would explain why digital PR can be so effective because digital PR tends to get links from Authority Publications like news and magazine sites that publish a lot of information and update that information a lot elsewhere we see plenty of mentions of page rank implying that this ageold Google metric that aims to classify the authority of a page based on the number and quality of links pointing at it is still a rank ing Factor but rather than just looking at the page rank of an individual page when deciding where to rank it it also appears that Google is measuring the page rank of that website's homepage as well of course this explains why it's so important to drive links not just to the individual pages on your website but also to the homepage we know this is true because of years of testing it one of the most interesting Concepts to me was around topic embeddings now this can get quite complicated so essentially it seems that Google is looking at the topical expertise of a site so how often is it talking about certain topics then when another page is published is that page on the same sorts of topics is it close to the same sort of topics that this website is known for well this ties into this concept which many in the SEO world have had of topical Authority we know from experience that it's easier to get content ranking on a site that tends to publish information about that topic but yet we could have didn't really point to anything specific that said this was true we just knew this from learned experience well now we see the metrics that Google is calculating working out whether a site is focused on one topic and how far away each Page's topic is from the site's topic there's one metric that I really wish we had more clarity on and that's ugc discussions effort score now many of us in the world of SEO have long thought that for example if you have a YouTube video where there's loads of discussion loads of comments about this video loads of interaction in the comments section that should be more authoritative than a YouTube video which has absolutely no comments no discussions at all this is one of those things that kind of makes logical sense and perhaps this is an indication that Google is tracking that type of thing there is also some new Clarity on your money or your life so your money or your life is a quite General concept which basically means that Google has a different set of standards for web content that talks about either Financial topics or health related topics but we didn't really know how Google worked out what your money or your life was or where the boundaries were well it appears that your money or your life is actually a score implying that it may even be a spectrum this is one of those things there's not a huge amount that we can do but it's really interesting to see this in the documentation well you might be watching this thinking Yeah Tim this is all great but what do I actually do about this one of the things that comes out of all of this data for me is the fact that many of us in the the world of SEO who have been experimenting and testing things and discovering things which we sort of intuitively knew for years but for me this validates the idea of working with experienced seos who've actually tested things honed and refined them over time the first website I have optimized to get showing up on Google was way back in 2007 and by about 2008 I could tell you that a bunch of this stuff was working even though there was no official documentation to prove it if you need help improving your websites ranking on Google then the team here at exposure ninja also have years and years of experience we've helped websites in every imaginable industry increase their visibility online and we have a free service called the free website and digital marketing review we will analyze your website's current visibility and we'll give you some recommendations and suggestions on how to increase your visibility and get more traffic from Google as well as other digital marketing sources all you need to do to apply for this free review is go to exposure ninja.com review we'll ask you a bit of information about your business and your marketing goals and then we'll put together a 15 to 20 minute video showing you exactly what to do to improve your website's visibility this service is completely free of charge but not everyone is eligible so you do need to go to exposure ninja.com SL review to apply for your review today all right so we got the nice stuff out of the way let's talk about some of the things that the SEO Community is a little bit annoyed about because some of these things fly in the face of official cutical guidelines that we've been told for years starting with domain Authority domain Authority has been a contentious Topic in the world of SEO because there are various tools out there that attempt to give an overall Authority score of a website now we've known that Google's own metric page rank works on a page by Page basis although as we've already seen today even when looking at an individual Pages Authority we know that Google is also looking at the homepages page rank two but this idea of a sitewide Authority score has previously been dismissed by googlers including Gary from Google who has said we don't really have overall domain Authority saying that there isn't really a domain Authority score well it looks like they might do there is a metric here called site Authority another thing that Google has been really clear about over the years is that they don't use Clicks in the search results to Define ranking I.E if lots of people are clicking on a website that doesn't necessarily mean that that website is going to rank more highly John meller from Google as recently as 2021 said if click-through rate were what drove search rankings the results would all be clickbait I don't see that happening but as you'll know from any algorithmically driven website or app how people are interacting with the content that they're shown is absolutely crucial Tik Tok wouldn't be so addictive if it wasn't measuring not just which videos you saw but but how long you stuck on each one whether you clicked on the comments it's measuring all of these interactions which is why Tik Tok is so good at retaining our engagement so why wouldn't Google track the number of clicks that each website was visiting in fact this is such an obvious point that we and exposure ninja have been talking about the fact that clicks have to be a ranking Factor since 2014 even though Google has officially stated we do not use clicks for ranking recently in the OJ antitrust trial where Google's in the docks for being a monopoly they detailed this idea of nav boost now nav boost is a set of ranking signals based on guess what you guessed it clicks and in this documentation we get more information about how nav boost works and the different types of clicks that it measures we can see there are clicks there are bad clicks so of course there are also good clicks but there are also last and longest clicks now think about what a last and longest click would be let's say that you're about to go on holiday and you need to buy some new luggage cuz that knacked old luggage is probably not going to survive another trip you scroll down the page you see a bunch of suitcases you click on the link yeah there's some suitcases on there but they don't really look like the sort of thing that you're after so you go back to Google you find another page you click on that wow these suitcases look great you read all about them you maybe spend some time looking at different products that it mentions and then you go through to buy bu now that was the last click that you made in that search so that's valuable because it solved your need it was also a long click cuz you spent a long time on that page last and longest clicks so it makes sense that content which attracts last and longest clicks will rank best on Google what do you have to do with this information well of course firstly you have to get the click so your page titles and meta descriptions need to be well optimized to attract people onto your page in the first place then you need to make sure the content on your site meets the person's needs it's no good having clickbait headlines getting people clicking if your page actually doesn't serve their needs otherwise they'd bounce straight back and that that would be a bad click so you need to provide enough information in your content and links to other pages on your site to keep them moving through in their journey and not going back to Google Now something that might really get Google into trouble particularly in their anti-rust case is whether or not it uses data from Google Chrome to rank websites many of us have speculated for years that one of the main reasons Google actually brought out a browser was not just to be able to collect user information for advertising purposes but to also understand what websites people were visiting so that it could improve its ranking algorithms but Google has for years said we don't use anything from Google Chrome for ranking which would seem to make this a little bit awkward okay so what does all of this actually mean well to be honest a lot of us in the SEO Community had figured out most of these things years ago from testing measuring and observing the fact that Google was trying to divert our attention from some of these things is kind of neither here nor there we were doing them anyway because we knew that they worked of course though this is a good reminder to treat anything that Google says with a little bit of healthy skepticism so what about the actual SEO advice that comes from all of this information well of course remember the caveat that we don't know how heavily any of these individual factors is weighted or even if they have been deprecated and aren't being used at all here's my take on what we do as a result of this firstly it seems logical to continue picking up links from high Authority sites that get refreshed often digital PR is a big winner from this secondly making sure that your website is known as an expert on your topic you're publishing lots of information about that topic and ideally with credible authors that are known as experts on these topics and this isn't new advice we've been saying this since the early days of medic and eat in like 2018 it's also clear that some of the good old SEO basics like page titles are still really important and you need to include your keywords at the start of your page titles again that's something I first observed and recommended to people 12 years ago and your meta descriptions even though they don't directly impact your ranking do seem to impact your ranking in that if they attract more clicks your click-through rate will help you rank better on Google so long as your content keeps people longest and is the last click that people make and in order to do that you have to make sure your website delet delivers what you're offering in your page title and meta description so people don't have to go back to the search results and find other sources of information now whilst this really annoying advice because it's very general and unspecific it's also a good idea to make sure you've done lots of marketing outside of Google so that when people see your brand in the search results they're more likely to click on you and in case that Chrome data is being used in r King it's a good idea to have people visiting your website all the time anyway even if it's not from Google search my final piece of advice is don't trust everything you hear or see from Google we've had some interesting characters being the voice of Google over the years for the SEO community and they've built up a lot of trust and credibility with some of us some of the Publications in our industry parot what these people say verba him they don't question or challenge anything that they say and we've all been guilty of trusting these people perhaps a little too much some of this information seems to directly contradict what these folk have told us over the years this is just a really good reminder that when it comes to SEO just parting best practice advice should really be secondary to testing measuring and trying your own things figuring out what works and doing that over and over again that's the way that you win in search that's the way that you win anywhere in digital marketing and by the way this isn't even the biggest thing going on with Google this month if you want to learn more about Google's AI overviews feature and crucially how to rank your website in AI overviews watch this video for a complete breakdown until next time see you soon

Channel: Exposure Ninja

Views: 3,605

Keywords: expninvids, google leak, google seo leak, google api leak, google, seo, search engine optimisation, search engine optimization

Id: aQ7AOMb87EY

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 10 2024