The information leaked in these documents gave us all a look behind the veil of the search engine’s secret algorithm. It has been widely suspected that Google uses over 200 factos in its algorth. However, this data suggests that it could be over 14,000! The documents in their entirety can be found here. There are some great writeups from Rand Fishkin, Mike King, and Search Engine Land that go into greater detail, which can be found in the links below.
The leaking of these documents was a highly unexpected betrayal of the search giant, given how meticulous they are with safe guarding the true components of their algorithm. Many of the revelations directly contradict many of the statements that Google mouthpiece’s like John Muehler and Gary Illyes have made over the years.
Google has historically tried to and downplay the effectiveness of many of strategies such as focus on keywords and link building. But it turns out that many of those were simply gaslighting of SEOs. I want to touch on two of the big lies that refer to strategies that hat we have had to defend continuously with clients, the use of links and click data.
Google to public: Links are not that important
Gary Illyes stated at a recent SEO conference, and then confirmed his statements in a tweet, that links are not that important and matter less than at any time in history. There are many sources that confirm these statements across the web, such as from Roger Montii from Search Engine Journal.
This direction from Google completely contradicts what our teams have continuously validated with our clients – reducing the number of low-quality links and the generation of new, high-quality links will absolutely affect performance positively.
We have had clients with million dollar budgets for link building alone. If it didn’t work, clients would not invest that kind of money. But, many have chosen to shy away from it simply because Google says that it doesn’t work.
Google Leak: Links really do matter
The leaked documents prove that Google likely does ignore links that do not come from a relevant source. This is not surprising, and is in line with SEO best practice. Google is only looking for references from highly authoritative sites to validate the authority of the receiving website.
What was very surprising is that Google actually DOES have a sitewide authority score, despite their claims to the contrary. In 2020, Mueller stated, “Just to be clear, Google doesn’t use Domain Authority at all when it comes to search crawling, indexing or ranking.” That was proven to be false. The leaked docs clearly reference a siteAuthority score. It is not clear what all goes in to this metric, but it appears to be a general assessment of authority. It would be highly unlikely that links and probably a mix of EEAT elements have nothing to do with it.
There is also indication that fresh link matter more than existing links. Freshdocs seems to be a value multiplier, meaning that new links placed within new content are given more value than new links placed within old content.
Its clear that backlinks from highly authoritative sites really do matter after all.
Google: User-centric metrics are not used in the algorithm
Google has downplayed the use of metrics such as click through data from the SERPs and bounce rate in their algorithm. We have a deliverable called Click Through Rate Analysis that we continuously have to defend because clients fail to see the value.
With this effort we use Google Search Console data to identify where there are a high number of impressions but low number of clicks, along with the Engagement Rate in Google Analytics. In other words, people are seeing the listing in the SERPs but are passing it by and clicking through to another listing, or are refining their search with another query.
Google Leak: User actions actually do matter.
The documents referenced several internal metrics that Google uses, such as badClicks, goodClicks, lastLongestClicks, and unsquashedClicks. All of this shows that if your listings in the SERPs is constantly passed over, or the interactions when someone does click through have an impact on your future performance.
This fact was also substantiated in the recent US vs Google antitrust trial. Eric Lehman, former software engineer at Google, told the court that pretty much everyone knows that Google uses clicks in rankings. Also revealed in the DOJ proceedings was a system called “NavBoost” that gathers data initially gathered by the PageRank Toolbar and now used to capture downstream click data.
This just proves that the words that come from the search giant should be weighed and measured, not simply taken as gospel. While many may trusting with the direction from Google, those who have been around a while understand that the only entity that Google has concern for is themselves.
Conversely, SEOs are concerned only for our companies and clients. Anything that we hear from Google should be tested and validated. If a tactic doesn’t work anymore – we will stop doing it. But we will continue to leverage any tactic that works to generate traffic and revenue.
Additional References:
SparkToro
IPullRank
SearchEngineLand