A slew of leaked Google documents have given us an unprecedented look at Google Search and revealed some of the most important elements Google uses to rank content.
What happened. Earlier this month, thousands of leaked internal documents, which appear to come from Google’s Content API Warehouse, were shared with SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin.
Read on to find out what we learned from Fishkin, as well as Michael King, CEO of iPullRank who also reviewed the papers (and plans to provide more analysis for Search Engine Land soon).
Why we care This leak gives us insight into how Google’s ranking algorithm works, which is invaluable for SEOs who can understand what it all means. In 2023, we got unprecedented insight into Yandex Search’s ranking factors through a leak, which was one of the biggest stories of that year.
This Google Docs leak? It will probably be one of the biggest stories in the history of SEO and Google Search.
what’s inside Here’s what we know about the leaked Fishkin and King documents:
Current: The documentation indicates that this information is accurate as of March.
Classification features: 2,596 modules with 14,014 attributes are represented in the API documentation.
Weighting: The documents did not specify how any of the ranking features are weighted, only that they exist.
Twiddlers: These are reclassification functions that “can adjust a document’s information retrieval score or change a document’s classification,” according to King.
Dismissals: Content can be degraded for a number of reasons, including: A link doesn’t match the destination site. SERP signals indicate user dissatisfaction. Product reviews. Location. Exact match domains. porn
Change history: Google apparently keeps a copy of every version of every page it has indexed. That is, Google can “remember” all the changes that have been made to a page. However, Google only uses the last 20 changes of a URL when analyzing links.
Links matter. Surprising, I know. This leak confirms that the diversity and relevance of links remains key. And PageRank is still very much alive within Google’s ranking functions.
Successful clicks are important. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, but if you want to rank well, the filtering elements clearly indicate that you need to keep creating great content and user experiences. Google uses a variety of metrics, including badClicks, goodClicks, lastLongestClicks, and unsquashedClicks.
Brand matters. The big takeaway from Fishkin’s leak is that brand matters more than anything else:
“If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers looking to massively improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be: ‘Build a notable, popular and well-recognized brand in your space outside of Google search.’ “.
Entities matter. Google stores the author information associated with the content and attempts to determine whether an entity is the author of the document.
SiteAuthority: Google uses something called “siteAuthority”.
Chrome data. A module called ChromeInTotal indicates that Google uses data from its Chrome browser for search ranking.
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