The search community is still unpacking and processing the big reveal of the Google Search rankings documents that were made public yesterday morning. Everyone has been wondering why Google hasn’t commented on the leak. Well, Google has finally commented: We spoke to a Google spokesperson about the data leak.
Google told us. Google told us that many assumptions are published based on data leakage that are being taken out of context, are incomplete, and added that search ranking signals are constantly changing. That doesn’t mean the basic principles of Google rankings change, they don’t, but the specific, individual signals that go into Google rankings do change, Google told us.
A Google spokesperson sent us the following statement:
“We would caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out-of-context, out-of-date, or incomplete information. We have shared extensive information about how search works and the types of factors that weigh our systems, while working to protect the integrity of our manipulation results.”
Google, however, will not comment on the specific elements, which are accurate, which are invalid, which are currently being used, how they are being used, and how strongly (weighted) they are being used. A Google spokesperson told me that Google won’t comment on specifics because Google never comments on specifics when it comes to its ranking algorithm. Google said that if they did comment, it can be used by spammers and/or bad actors to manipulate their rankings.
Google also told us that it would be wrong to assume that this data leak is complete, fully relevant, or even provides up-to-date information about your search rankings.
Did Google lie to us? That’s hard to say for sure. There are some clear details about the ranking signals that Google has historically told us they don’t use, which were specifically mentioned in the leaked documents. Of course, Google’s statement says that what’s in the document may never have been used, may have been tested over a period of time, may have changed over the years, or may have been used. Again, Google won’t go into details.
Of course, many people in the SEO community have always thought that Google lied to us and that you should do your own testing to see what works in SEO and what doesn’t work in SEO.
I, for one, trust people when they look me in the eye and say something. I don’t think any of the Google representatives I’ve spoken to over the years have outright lied to me. Maybe it was language semantics, maybe Google wasn’t using a specific signal at the time, or maybe I’m super naive (which is very possible) and Google lied.
Communication from Google. Google told me that they are still committed to providing accurate information, but as I noted above, they won’t go into specifics on a signal-by-signal basis. Google also said that its ranking systems change over time and that it will continue to communicate what information it can to the community.
it matters Either way, ultimately, all these signs point to the same thing. I think Mike King, who was the first to research this document and help reveal the details, said that ultimately we need to create content and a website that people want to visit, spend time on, click on and link to. The best way to do this is to create a website and content that people want to like and enjoy. So an SEO’s job is to keep building great sites, with great content. Yeah, that’s a boring answer, sorry.
What happened. As we covered, thousands of documents were published, which appear to come from Google’s internal Content API repository. March 13 on Github by an automated bot called yoshi-code-bot. These documents were shared with SparkToro co-founder Rand Fishkin earlier this month.
Why we care As we’ve previously reported, we’ve been given a peek into how Google’s ranking algorithm might work, which is invaluable for SEOs who can understand what it all means. As a reminder, in 2023 we got an unprecedented look at Yandex Search’s ranking factors via a leak, which was one of the biggest stories of that year. This Google leak is likely to be the story of the year, maybe the century.
But what do we do with this information? Probably exactly what we’ve been doing without this information: building great sites with great content.
The articles Here are the two main articles that broke this story about this Google data leak:
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