It seems that Google's secrets have finally been revealed. The tech giant has always kept its search algorithms top secret. However, someone has apparently leaked the API documentation for Google's search algorithm, raising hopes in the SEO world that the Google search algorithm has finally been cracked. Rand Fishkin, an SEO expert and CEO of a marketing research company, recently received an anonymous email that claimed to have access to the API documentation, which is over 2,500 pages long and contains 14,014 attributes or API functions.
Fishkin wrote in his blog that despite his suspicions, he contacted the sender via video call, who turned out to be Erfan Azimi, founder of a digital marketing company and an SEO practitioner himself.
So, let’s get to the information we’ve all been waiting for – the boxes you need to check if you want to drive more traffic to your website.
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What matters to the Google search algorithm — check these boxes
Domain Authority: There have been some instances in the past where Google has clearly stated that a website's domain authority is not the focus for appearing at the top of search pages. On the other hand, Google does have a feature called “site authority.” However, there is little clarity on how these metrics are calculated.
Click-Driven Boost: Previously, Google also claimed that clicks are not used in ranking calculations, but there is solid evidence to suggest that clicks are part of those metrics. According to a SparkToro report by Rand Fishkin, Google VP of Search Pandu Nayak spoke about NavBoost and Glue ranking systems during testimony at the Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust trial last November. Nayak said that they both use click-driven methods to raise, lower or enhance search rankings. He revealed that Google has employed NavBoost since 2005 and has used 18 months of click data to date. Google representatives have previously stated that “dwell time” is not a feature, while Navboost certainly does consider longer clicks, which is similar.
Chrome data: Google likely also uses Chrome data to determine rankings, something the company has previously denied.
Zwirler: Mike King, an SEO veteran and CEO of marketing agency iPullRank, also received the API documentation for Google's search algorithm. He spoke about “Twiddlers,” another important feature in the SEO ranking system. He described “Twiddlers” as a re-ranking feature. To better illustrate this, let's take an example from another Google user, Debarghya Das. Das once said that he had disabled Twiddlers in X without realizing that “all of our YouTube searches depended on it,” The Hindu reported.
Articles written: King also said that Google stores the names of authors of articles. According to a SparkToro article, Google can identify authors and treat them as entities in its system. Therefore, increasing your influence as an author online can lead to ranking benefits in Google.
While Google's leak isn't anything to be worried about, it does serve as a reminder to not take the company's word at face value. About two days after the leak, Google acknowledged that the data was 100% its own, but then “warned people not to make inaccurate inferences about searches based on out-of-context, out-of-date, or incomplete information.”
Some may be wondering how this leak even happened in the first place.
How did the documents get leaked?
According to reports, the source of the document shared by Azimi is listed as “yoshi-code-bot /elixer-google-api”, which means that it was accidentally published by Google's internal content API warehouse. The code was made publicly available to the world on March 27 and was removed on May 7.
While the document doesn’t share the exact details of how the search algorithm works, it does provide a checklist of some key elements.