For more than 25 years, exactly how Google organizes the web has been one of the Internet’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
Google is the gateway to the Internet that so many businesses depend on, but its ever-evolving algorithms have remained heavily guarded behind lock and key.
Until this week, when the black box was finally opened.
A set of 2,500 documents containing highly coveted secrets about how Google ranks its search results pages began circulating among a handful of SEO experts, who shared them more widely on Monday. The company has confirmed that the material is real.
The already frantic search engine optimization, or SEO, community went into overdrive, with social networking sites and industry forums buzzing.
The frenzy soon turned to fury, as some SEO experts said the documents showed Google hasn’t always been honest in answering questions about how it ranks websites.
“This is another level of war between SEOs and Googlers,” said Lily Ray, vice president of SEO agency Amsive.
Erfan Azimi, CEO of SEO agency EA Eagle Digital, who claimed to have first stumbled upon the documents online, posted a spectacular 13-minute YouTube video. For Azim and many others in the SEO community, some details of the leak seemed to confirm their suspicions: Google may not have been entirely honest about the most important signals that determine which sites appear in the coveted top half of the search engine results page.
“For more than a decade, we’ve been lied to,” Azimi said, looking down the barrel of his camera lens. “The truth must come out.”
Even so, the most dedicated SEO code crackers have yet to determine how up-to-date the information is, or which of the apparent 14,000 ranking factors even saw the light of day.
A Google spokesperson said the documents are out of context and that the way their systems work can change frequently. They declined to comment on specific fields in the data.
“We will caution against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “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 results from manipulation.”
The leak has stoked further distrust of Google just as it prepares to rewrite the rulebook. With Google promising to “Google Google for you” with its AI-powered generative summaries, many website owners are preparing for a possible future where the company vacuums up their content and delivers no visitors to exchange.
“As AI Takes Over the World, Does Anyone Know How It Works?” said Gareth Hoyle, CEO of marketing agency Marketing Signals. “Who guards the guards?”
Why Google keeps search secret
Google employees are under strict instructions to keep quiet about the search. An internal presentation for employeesthat surfaced last year during Google’s Justice Department search antitrust trial, told staff to keep discussions of the company’s most prized product “on a need-to-know basis.”
“Everything we filter will be used against us by SEOs, patent trolls, competitors, etc.,” the document said. “Search issues can inflame world leaders who have power over Google, demand congressional hearings, etc.” it continued.
This is what we know. At its most basic level, Google uses web crawlers: robots that read websites, map their link structures, and track various keywords. These trackers are designed to ensure that Google search results return the most relevant and up-to-date information to the user.
Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president who oversees search
Beyond that, how Google determines “good” or “useful” content, where keywords should be placed, and how links should appear on web pages has been an ever-evolving mystery . Enter the world of SEO, where professionals do rigorous testing, exchange tips and theories at conferences, and press their Google representatives and their dedicated “Public Search Liaison” about which ranking factors they should give more weight to. For some SEOs, the documents show that they would have been better off sticking to their own assumptions.
Make clicks. SEO experts have long believed that Google analyzes when and how often a website receives clicks to determine its ranking. The leaked documents refer to “goodClicks” and “unsquashedClicks,” terms that SEOs believe could show that Google is measuring clicks more than allowed in the past.
“One thing I took away from all of this is that Google actually uses click data a lot more than we thought,” said Grace Frohlich, an SEO consultant at digital marketing agency Brainlabs.
The documents also refer to the meanings “isElectionAuthority” and “isCovidLocalAuthority”, suggesting that Google may rank certain sites as more authoritative on these topics.
Then there’s domain authority – an assessment of the quality and trustworthiness of a site for a relevant topic. Google has said it doesn’t use domain authority as a ranking factor in the past, but the docs refer to a factor called “siteAuthority.”
Or use Google’s Chrome browser. the company said in the past which does not use browsing data accumulated by Chrome to rank websites. However, several references to Chrome in the documents have SEO experts convinced that Google has, in fact, used its popular browser to help rank the web (given the extent to which regulators are looking into how Google may use ‘self-preference to increase search and your ads). business, you can see why the company might be shy about this one).
“The big picture is just highlighting those areas where we were right, and Google was telling us we were wrong,” said Michael King, founder and CEO of digital marketing agency iPullRank. King was one of the first people to analyze the documents from his blog.
Some in the SEO community are wary of reading too much into the leak. Aleyda Solís, founder and SEO consultant at SEO firm Orainti, cautioned that some people can see what they want in documents and that it’s not clear how Google “weights” factors like clicks or other values.
“We don’t even know if they all count as real ranking factors,” Solís said.
“We’re already on thin ice”
The relationship between SEOs and Google had already turned frosty. Some business owners have reported catastrophic drops in website traffic following two recent major updates to Google’s search algorithm within a span of months, while sites like Reddit and Quora have flooded the top of the pages of search results.
Downsizing Google’s workforce also reduced the number of human representatives available to SEOs. While Google hosts lavish evenings for its advertising clients, such as the star-studded YouTube Brandcast, it doesn’t make similar investments in events for the SEO community. This has led some in the SEO community to lament a breakdown in the relationship between the search giant and the experts who helped it organize all that information.
“We’re already on very thin ice with them,” said Amsive’s Ray.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai on stage at Google IO 2023
JOSH EDELSON/GETTY
All this comes as Google goes full steam ahead with AI generative search. Its recent tests of AI-generated summaries in search results in the US turned into a mockery when the search engine pulled from satirical websites and Reddit posts to suggest eating rocks for nutritional purposes and using glue to make that the cheese sticks to the pizza. Google’s response was met with an equally dubious response from the search community. Google initially claimed that the AI was only spitting out answers for uncommon queries, but then he said was “taking swift action” to manually remove incorrect responses that violate its content policy.
While search filtering may not dramatically change the way websites play Google’s game, and may not necessarily reflect how Google ranks the web today, SEOs will be watching carefully to see if the rules from the docs apply in the new world order of AI search. For example, the documents show that Google has been on an “inexorable path” to drive more traffic to big brand websites than smaller publishers, wrote Rand Fishkinco-founder and CEO of audience research firm SparkToro.
The leak confirmed that quality content should always win out over trying to game the algorithm, said Eric Hoover, director of SEO at digital agency Jellyfish.
“That doesn’t really change with generative AI,” Hoover said.
For now, Google still dominates the search landscape, leaving plenty of time for SEOs to continue trying to decipher the code within the remittances of documents now in public view. They don’t have anyone from the company to give them a hand.
“I think it will ultimately inform the best correlation studies we do in our space,” King said. “But I think it may also mean that Google talks to us less.”
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