Google will not comment on a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation

Google’s search algorithm is perhaps the most important system on the internet, dictating which sites live and die and what web content looks like. But exactly how Google ranks websites has long been a mystery, unraveled by journalists, researchers and people who work in search engine optimization.

Now, an explosive leak that aims to show thousands of pages of internal documents appears to offer an unprecedented look at how Search works — and suggests that Google hasn’t been completely forthcoming about it for years. So far, Google has not responded to multiple requests for comment on the legitimacy of the documents.

Rand Fishkin, who has worked in SEO for more than a decade, says a source shared 2,500 pages of documents with him in hopes that reporting on the leak would counter the “lies” Google employees shared about how the SEO algorithm works. search. The documents describe Google’s search API and detail what information is available to employees, according to Fishkin.

The details shared by Fishkin are dense and technical, likely more readable for developers and SEO experts than laypeople. The content of the leak is also not necessarily proof that Google uses the specific data and signals it mentions for search rankings. Instead, the leak describes what data Google collects from web pages, websites and searchers and offers indirect hints to SEO experts about what Google seems to care about, as SEO expert Mike King said. he wrote in your document overview.

The leaked documents cover topics like what kind of data Google collects and uses, which sites Google elevates for sensitive topics like elections, how Google handles small sites, and more. Some information in the documents appears to conflict with public statements from Google representatives, according to Fishkin and King.

“’Lied’ is harsh, but it is the only correct word to use here,” King writes. “While I don’t necessarily blame Google’s public representatives for protecting its proprietary information, I disagree with their efforts to actively discredit people in the worlds of marketing, technology and journalism who have presented reproducible findings.”

Google did not respond to On the edge’requests for comments regarding the documents, including a direct request to refute their legitimacy. Fish said On the edge in an email that the company did not dispute the veracity of the leak, but that an employee asked him to change some language in the post regarding how an event was characterized.

Google’s secret search algorithm has given rise to an entire industry of marketers who closely follow Google’s public guidelines and execute them for millions of businesses around the world. The widespread and often irritating tactics have led to a general narrative that Google Search results are getting worse, filled with the garbage that website operators feel obligated to produce in order to get their sites seen. In reply to On the edgeIn previous reports on SEO-oriented tactics, Google representatives often fall back on a familiar defense: That’s not what the Google Guidelines to say.

But some details in the leaked documents question the accuracy of Google’s public statements about how Search works.

One example cited by Fishkin and King is whether Google Chrome data is used in ranking. Google representatives have repeatedly indicated which doesn’t use Chrome data to rank pages, but Chrome is specifically mentioned in sections about how sites appear in Search. In the screenshot below, which I captured as an example, the links that appear below the main vogue.com URL may be created in part using data from Chrome, according to the docs.

Another question raised is what role, if any, the EEAT plays in the classification. EEAT stands for experience, knowledge, authority and trustworthiness, a Google metric used to evaluate the quality of results. Google representatives have previously said that EEAT is not a ranking factor. Fishkin notes that he didn’t find much in the documents that mention the EEAT by name.

King, however, detailed how Google appears to collect data from a page’s author and has a field for whether an entity on the page is the author. A portion of the documents shared by King says the field was “developed and tuned primarily for news articles… but is also populated for other content (e.g., scientific articles).” While this doesn’t confirm that subscriptions are an explicit ranking metric, it does show that Google is at least tracking this attribute. Google representatives have previously insisted that author subscriptions are something website owners should do for readers, not Google, because it doesn’t affect rankings.

While the documents aren’t exactly a smoking gun, they do provide an in-depth, unfiltered look into a closely guarded black box system. The US government’s antitrust case against Google – which revolves around Search – has also caused internal documentation to become public, offering more information about how the company’s flagship product works.

Google’s general caution about how Search works has made websites look the same as SEO marketers trying to trick Google based on the tips the company offers. Fishkin also calls out publications that credulously support Google’s public claims as true without much further analysis.

“Historically, some of the search industry’s loudest voices and most prolific publishers have been happy to uncritically repeat Google’s public statements. They write headlines like “Google says XYZ is true” instead of “Google claims XYZ; The evidence suggests otherwise,’” writes Fishkin. “Please do better. If this leak and the DOJ ruling can create just one change, I hope this is it.”