We're starting to shed some light on Google's search black box.
The leak of 2,500 internal documents, which Google has verified as authentic, sheds some light on the workings of its search engine, long a mystery to search engine optimization experts and companies, including what data the company collects, how it uses links and how it views smaller websites.
“SEO has always been a black box,” says Travis Tallent, VP of SEO at Brainlabs. “It's always been experimental and driven primarily by testing. This document is something we've been waiting a long time for.”
On March 13, the leaked documents were published on Github and analyzed by SEO experts Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro, and Michael King, CEO of iPullRank.
Some details in the document call into question the accuracy of Google's public statements, but Fishkin told ADWEEK it would be foolish to listen to Google's public statements about how its system works.
“We want to be careful not to make inaccurate inferences about searches based on out-of-context, out-of-date or incomplete information,” a Google spokesperson told ADWEEK. “We share extensive information about how search works and the types of factors our system weighs, while also working to protect the integrity of our search results from manipulation.”
Chrome affects searches
While Google representatives claim that Chrome data isn't used in their page-ranking algorithms, there are references to Chrome in a section detailing how website links are displayed in search. The documentation also mentions a module called “Chrome in Total.”