Several leaked Google documents on SEO suggest that the company isn't being honest about its practices. Google has not said anything about the authenticity of the documents and has yet to officially respond to the leaks.
Google's official SEO documentation has been circulating online, totaling over 2,500 pages and describing over 14,000 key ranking features. The leak has raised many questions about whether the company is being honest about how websites are ranked in Google search results.
Black box
In general, Google's communication about SEO is very limited. The entire system is a black box, and journalists, researchers, and SEO marketers are trying to unravel its secrets. The leaked documents help stakeholders better understand what factors are taken into account when ranking. They also provide new insight into some SEO rules that were believed to be true but may have been misrepresented by Google.
The details were shared by Rand Fishkin, who has been in the SEO industry for over 10 years, after the document was passed to him through an anonymous source, and he hopes the bill will expose Google's “lies.”
One example is the role of Chrome data in determining whether a search result is ranked higher or lower. The company says this data has no influence. However, Fishkin claims to have found examples where URLs mentioned by Chrome are ranked higher or saved as additional links under the main URL. Furthermore, the role of the EAT is(experience, Expertise, authority and reliability) has been strongly questioned. Google says this factor is irrelevant, but SEO expert Mike King, who reviewed the document, believes that Google is collecting information about the authors of texts. The company tracks authors of news articles, but also does this for “other content.” The company has previously argued that authors can make themselves known to readers, but not to Google. The company says it does not use this information for SEO.
Leaked by a Google employee
Contrary to appearances, the documents currently circulating were not captured all at once; they are a collection of documents leaked over a long period of time. A Google employee unintentionally contributed to this by posting the documents to GitHub and forgetting to set the visibility to private.
Google discovered the leak a few weeks ago and reclassified all affected documents as private, so the documents are no longer readable in Google's latest GitHub repository.
Development never stops
It has yet to be confirmed whether the documents shared online are in fact from Google, which has remained aloof aside from messages from company employees asking Fishkin to adjust his explanation of how the events were categorized.
The leak is meaningful for SEO marketers to gain a deeper understanding of how the system works, but not much else. The US investigation into the search engine revealed unfair practices towards advertisers. Even if this turns out to be illegal, the company will continue to innovate the way it generates advertising revenue. For example, the addition of AI technology to the search engine will bring another change in the near future.
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