A trove of leaked Google documents has provided an unprecedented look inside Google search, revealing some of the most important factors Google uses to rank content.
what happened. Earlier this month, thousands of internal documents believed to have been leaked from Google's internal content API warehouse were shared with SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin.
- Read on to see what we learned from Fishkin and iPullRank CEO Michael King, who also reviewed the documents (and will provide further analysis to Search Engine Land soon).
Why we care. The leak provided a glimpse into how Google's ranking algorithm works, which is invaluable for SEOs who want to understand what it all means. In 2023, we got an unprecedented look into Yandex Search ranking factors through the leak, which was one of the biggest news stories of the year.
This Google doc leak? This is probably going to be one of the biggest news stories in the history of SEO and Google search.
What's inside? Here's what we know about the documents leaked by Fishkin and King.
- the current: The documents state this information was accurate as of March.
- Ranking feature: The API documentation represents 2,596 modules with 14,014 attributes.
- Weighting: The document doesn't specify how the ranking features are weighted, simply stating that they exist.
- Zwirler: These are reranking features that “can adjust a document's information retrieval score or change the document's ranking,” King said.
- Demotion: Content can be demoted for a variety of reasons, including:
- The link does not match the target site.
- SERP signals indicate user dissatisfaction.
- Product reviews.
- position.
- Exact match domain.
- Porn
- change history: Google appears to store copies of every version of every page it's ever indexed, which means that Google can “remember” every change made to a page, but when analyzing links, Google only uses the last 20 changes to a URL.
Links are important. Shocking! This leak confirms that link diversity and relevance still matter, and that PageRank is still alive and well in Google's ranking mechanisms.
Successful clicks matter. This isn’t surprising, but the leaked elements clearly show that you need to keep creating great content and user experience if you want to rank highly. Google uses a variety of metrics, including badClicks, goodClicks, lastLongestClicks, and unsquashedClicks.
Brands matter. The biggest lesson Fishkin took from the leak is that brand matters more than anything.
- “If there was one universal piece of advice I could give to marketers looking to dramatically improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be to build a brand that is visible, popular, and well-known in your field outside of Google search.”
Entities are important. Google stores authorship information associated with content and attempts to determine whether an entity is the author of a document.
Site Permissions: Google uses something called “siteAuthority”.
Chrome data. The module, called ChromeInTotal, shows that Google is using Chrome browser data for search rankings.
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