What’s the news: More than 2,500 pages of Google API (application programming interface) documentation containing 14,014 API attributes were leaked to Github on March 27, 2024 and remained on the site until May 7 . These API documents reveal what Google considers important when ranking a website in its search engine. The leak was spotted by Erfan Azimi, founder of search engine optimization (SEO) company EA Eagle Digital, and was Find out more by SEO professional Rand Fishkin.
Based on their analysis of the leaked data, the two SEO professionals said that Google uses click data (including good, bad and long clicks) in its systems like NavBoost and Glue. According to witness given by Google’s vice president of search, Pandu Nayak, in Google’s US lawsuit, these systems help rank the content that ultimately appears on the search engine’s results pages. The data suggests that Google has ways of filtering out clicks it doesn’t want to count in its ranking systems and including those that do. It appears that the company is also measuring the duration of clicks and impressions.
The use of click data here is interesting given what Google has done previously denied based on click data in the search ranking. It should be noted here that Google has not confirmed the data leak. We’ve reached out to Google and will update this story when we hear back from the company.
Other key takeaways from the data breach:
Google creates sitelinks based on the most clicked URLs in Google Chrome: Sitelinks are sublinks that are listed on a parent site. For example, if you search for MediaNama, you will get the following site links:
Based on Fishkin’s reading of the leaked data, sitelinks created by Google take into account the number of clicks on pages in the Chrome browser.
Google whitelists certain authorities and sites: If you search for trips in the leaked data, you find a pattern dedicated to “Good quality travel sites,” which Fishkin argues, suggests the company has a whitelist for travel sites. Similarly, it could be argued that the company also has other whitelists, based on leaked code that flag local authorities related to COVID-19 and elections.
You can read Fishkin’s full analysis of the leak and efforts to verify that the data belongs to Google here.
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