Rand Fishkin along with Mike King may have released one of the largest data leaks outside of the Department of Justice revealed around Google Search and its internal ranking features and signals. The document was from an anonymous source but verified by Rand Fishkin and contains a lot of details about how Google Search works.
More importantly, it seems to contradict a number of Google statements made over the past two decades by numerous Google Search employees, as I’ve covered here in the past.
I haven’t gone through it all yet, but I thought it important that you all read this yourselves, you can see the details in these headlines:
Rand wrote: “Many of your claims directly contradict public statements made by Googlers over the years, particularly the company’s repeated denials that click-centric user signals are used, the denial that subdomains are considered separately in rankings, sandbox disallowances for newer websites, disallowances that are collected or considered for a domain’s age, and more.”
Mike King wrote: “I’ve reviewed the API reference documents and contextualized them with some other previous Google leaks and DOJ antitrust testimony. I’m combining this with the extensive patent and white paper research done for the my upcoming book, The Science of SEO Although there are no details on Google’s scoring functions in the documentation I reviewed, there is a wealth of information about the data stored for content, links and user interactions ) of the features being manipulated and stored. You would be tempted to broadly call these “classification factors”, but that would be imprecise.
Aleyda Solis gives a brief summary X where he summarized some of the leak:
There are 14,000 ranking functions and more in the documentation that Google has a function they calculate called “siteAuthority”. Navboost has a specific module fully focused on click signals that represent users as voters and their clicks are stored as votes that Google stores, the result has the longest click. during the session, Google has an attribute called hostAge that is specifically used “to test for new spam during service time”. One of the modules related to Page Quality Scores includes a site-level view measurement from Chrome.
I haven’t had time to go through it all yet, I will over the next few days.
I haven’t seen any Googlers publicly comment on it yet either; i know it’s new and i don’t know if we’ll see any feedback from google about it.
This reminds me a bit like the Yandex search ranking leak.
Here are some social media posts about it – again, this was only a few hours ago and no one but Rand and Mike had any real time to process this in great detail.
A big thanks to @iPullRankwho I contacted on Friday after seeing the leak, and who helped analyze and decipher much of these early findings: https://t.co/JGYdGydKlC
— Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) (@randfish) May 28, 2024
Okay, let’s get this party started!
A couple of weeks ago I said I was posting the most important thing I’ve ever written. I was wrong.
Documentation related to the Google Search algorithm was leaked and I spent the weekend tearing it apart.https://t.co/v71B16Ggov
✌🏾
— Mic King (@iPullRank) May 28, 2024
🚨 Google Search’s internal engineering documentation has been leaked and analyzed by @iPullRank 👀 Many of these had refused to be used by Google👇
* There are 14K and more classification functions in documents
* Google has a function they calculate called “siteAuthority”
* Navboost has… pic.twitter.com/dlpCIQdpDm
— Aleyda Solis 🕊️ (@aleyda) May 28, 2024
Until it’s (possibly) taken down by Google’s lawyers, here’s a direct link to the leaked Google Ranking API docs
“google_api_content_warehouse v0.4.0”
Save these pages! pic.twitter.com/9dXobbr2U1
— Cyrus SEO (@CyrusShepard) May 28, 2024
Very interesting blog entry from @iPullRank.
Another of the many that he writes and that we save ourselves is the utility ⬇️ https://t.co/VZH8EARV1G
— Gianluca Fiorelli (@gfiorelli1) May 28, 2024
Apparently, someone at Google Search “accidentally” leaked an engineering paper that reveals a bunch of secrets about how the search engine works, including that they have a “Gold Document” flag that gives more weight to a document with “human etiquette” which could mean some… pic.twitter.com/zeG79f161B
— Joe Youngblood (@YoungbloodJoe) May 28, 2024
If you want to find out with me, I’ll keep updating this Google Doc for the next 30 minutes with anything interesting before I get back to normal life.https://t.co/1iQ40nknZ0
— Glen Allsopp 👾 (@ViperChill) May 28, 2024
I’m really looking forward to digging into this.
Discussion in the forum a X.
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