The key to online success usually depends on one important factor above all others: your website’s ranking in Google Search.
For decades, an entire industry, search engine optimization or “SEO”, has revolved around trying to decipher the code that makes a given page rise in the positions of various keyword search queries on Google.
This week, this “code”, or more specifically the secrets behind Google’s search engine algorithm, have filtered.
“In the last quarter of a century, no leak of this magnitude or detail has ever been reported from Google’s search division,” said Rand Fishkin, CEO of Sparktoro, a longtime influential figure in the SEO industry.
The tweet may have been deleted
Fishkin has worked in the industry for years and founded the established SEO company, Moz. Fishkin’s long SEO history is probably why an unnamed person decided to send him the internal Google document “Content API Warehouse”. This 2,500-page document details a wealth of previously unknown or unconfirmed knowledge about how Google decides to rank websites in its search engine.
While Google has done it not confirmed legitimacy of the leak, Fishkin has shared that a Google employee contacted him to change the characterization of some of the details he published in the breakdown of the document. Fishkin and a number of other SEO and digital marketing leaders have also examined the pages and believe the leak is legitimate.
SEE ALSO:
We gave Google’s AI Overviews the benefit of the doubt. Here’s how they did it.
There is a lot of technical information in the document, which seems to be more for developers and technical SEO professionals than for lay people or even SEO professionals specializing in content creation. However, there are some extremely interesting details that everyone can take away from this leak.
Obviously, Google uses Chrome to rank pages
This is especially interesting as Google has done it before denied using Chrome to rank websites.
According to documents analyzed by experts such as Fishkin, it appears that Google tracks how many clicks a web page receives from users in its web browser, Chrome, in order to choose which pages of a website to include in its search query sitemap .
So while it doesn’t appear that Google uses this information to decide where to rank an entire site, analysts have speculated that the company uses Chrome activity to decide which internal pages to show in search on the site’s homepage. web site
Google seems to label sites “small personal” for some reason
SEO expert Mike King of iPullRank flagged it and it has raised more questions than answers.
Speed of light mashable
According to Google’s internal document analysis, the company has a specific flag it attaches to “small personal websites.” It is not clear how Google determines what a “small” or “personal” website is, nor is there any information on why Google labels websites with this label. Is this to help promote them in search? To lower them in the ranking?
Its purpose is a mystery at this time.
Clicks matter a lot
This is another topic that SEO experts have speculated about for a long time, which Google has denied along the years. And once again, it seems the experts were right.
It turns out that Google relies on user clicks for search rankings much more than previously known.
NavBoost is a Google ranking factor that focuses on improving search results. It focuses heavily on click data to improve these results. According to King, we now know that NavBoost has a “specific module entirely focused on click signals.” An important factor that determines a website’s ranking for a search query: short clicks versus long clicks, or how long a user stays on a page after clicking a link from a Google search.
Exact match domains can be bad for search rankings
If you’ve ever come across a domain name with multiple keywords and hyphens, such as used-cars-en-venda.net for example, at least part of the reason was probably SEO. Domain investors and the digital marketing community have long believed that Google rewarded exact match domain names.
Turns out that’s not always true. In fact, an exact match domain can hurt your rankings.
About a decade ago, Google did To share that exact match domain names would no longer be highly regarded as a ranking tool, despite being favored by the algorithm at the same time. However, we now have proof thanks to this leak that there is a mechanism to actively demote these websites in Google Search. It turns out that Google views many of these types of domains the same way as keyword stuffing practices. The algorithm considers this type of URL as possible spam.
Topic whitelists
According to document analysis, Google has whitelists for certain topics. This means that websites that appear in Google Search for these types of search queries must be manually approved and do not appear based on normal algorithmically ranked search factors.
Some of the themes aren’t too surprising. Websites that contain content related to COVID information and political inquiries, specifically election information, are whitelisted.
However, there is also a whitelist for travel websites. It is not clear what this whitelist is for. SEO experts have suggested that this could be related to travel sites appearing in specific Google travel tabs and widgets.
Google “lied”
Fishkin, King and other SEO experts have been able to confirm and disprove many SEO theories thanks to this leaked document. And now it’s clear to them that Google hasn’t been entirely truthful about how its search algorithm has worked over the years.
“‘Lie’ is harsh, but it’s the only accurate word used here,” King wrote in his own breakdown of the Google Content API Warehouse document.
“While I don’t necessarily blame Google’s public representatives for protecting their proprietary information, I do question their efforts to actively discredit people in the worlds of marketing, technology, and journalism who have come up with reproducible discoveries.” , he said.
As industry experts continue to sift through this massive document, we may soon uncover some more interesting details hidden in Google’s search algorithm.
A Google representative declined Mashable’s request for comment.
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