The search community is still unravelling and processing the massive revelation of Google search ranking documents that were published yesterday morning. Everyone is wondering why Google hasn't commented on the leak. And now Google has finally commented. We spoke to a Google spokesperson about the data leak.
Google told me. Google said that many of the assumptions published based on the data leaks are out of context and incomplete, and that search ranking signals are constantly changing. This does not mean that Google's core ranking principles will change – they will not, but certain individual signals that go into Google rankings will.
A Google spokesperson provided the following statement:
“We are careful not to make inaccurate inferences about searches based on out-of-context, out-of-date, or incomplete information. We share extensive information about how our searches work and the types of factors our system weighs, and we work to protect the integrity of our search results from manipulation.”
But Google wouldn't comment on specific factors, such as the exact factors, invalid factors, factors currently in use, how they're used, and how strongly (weighted) they're used. Google won't comment on specifics because it doesn't comment specifically on ranking algorithms, a Google spokesperson told me. Google said that if it did comment, spammers and bad actors could use it to manipulate rankings.
Google also said it would be a mistake to assume that the data leak was comprehensive, fully relevant, or provided up-to-date information about search rankings.
Did Google lie to us? Certainly not. There are some explicit details about ranking signals that Google has said it has not used, and they are specifically mentioned in the leaked documents. Of course, Google's statement goes on to say that the contents of the documents have never been used, have not been tested for any period of time, and may change or be used over the years. Again, Google would not go into details.
Of course, many in the SEO community have always felt that Google has been lying to us and that we need to do our own testing to see what works and what doesn’t in SEO.
Personally, I trust people who look me in the eye and tell me stuff, and I don't believe that any Google rep I've spoken to over the years has outright lied to me. Maybe it was a matter of language semantics, or maybe Google wasn't using certain signals at the time, or maybe I'm just very naive (which is very possible) and Google lied.
Google Communications. Google told me that it remains committed to providing accurate information, but as I mentioned above, it doesn't intend to provide specific details for each ranking signal. Google also said that its ranking system changes over time, so it will keep its community as informed as possible.
Does that matter? Either way, at the end of the day, all these signals point to the same thing. I think Mike King, who first dug into this document and uncovered the details, was saying that ultimately you need to build content and a website that people want to visit, spend time on, click on and link to. The best way to achieve that is to build a website and content that people love and enjoy. So the job of an SEO is to continue to build a great site with great content. Ok, sorry for the boring answer.
what happened. As we previously reported, thousands of documents that appear to have come from Google's internal Content API warehouse were published on Github on March 13 by an automated bot called yoshi-code-bot. The documents were then shared with SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin earlier this month.
Why we care. As we said before, we got a glimpse into how Google’s ranking algorithm works, which is invaluable information for SEOs who can understand what it means. Incidentally, in 2023, a leak led to an unprecedented exposure of Yandex search ranking factors, which was one of the biggest news stories of the year. This Google leak will probably be the news of the year, or even the century.
But what do we do with this information? Probably the exact same thing we'd have been doing without this information: building a great site with great content.
article. The two main articles that broke the news about this Google data leak were: