SPECIAL ISSUE:
Everything You Need to Know About the Huge Google Search Leak

A disgruntled marketer has leaked thousands of pages of Google's confidential search documentation. It is the biggest leak in the history of Google Search.

Full Coverage

“This is massive.”

Did Google Lie to the Marketing Community?

Click data is one of many clues

Maybe, but out of necessity

Or maybe even the reps didn’t know?

What’s In the Documents

Highlights

Docs had been in plain view for two months

How much of it is actually in use?

Should We Change Our SEO Strategies Now?

“Build content that people like.”

“Think more about UX principles.”

More Reading

At first glance, you might think the video is of a software engineer doing a job interview.

He’s got the software engineer uniform — pressed jeans, white polo shirt, neatly groomed facial hair. He’s sitting down, looking right into the camera.

Only this is no job interview. This is the guy who, this past weekend, leaked Google’s most important trade secrets. Because he’s mad.

His name is Efran Azimi.

Today, he uploaded the video below, revealing that he was the person behind the massive weekend leak of internal Google Search documents that has sparked chaos in the marketing industry.

He’s mad because the documents — 2,500 pages worth — seem to contradict what Google has told marketers for decades about how to rank higher in the search results.

The leak is a set of confidential, internal documents (API documentation, to be precise) detailing Google’s secret sauce — the parameters and levers that run their money-printing search engine.

We are devoting our full issue to this leak today, what’s in it, and what it means for marketers going forward.

“This is Massive.”

Barry Schwartz has been covering the SEO industry for most of his career. He writes at SERoundable.com 

I spoke with him this morning and he told me:

Did Google Lie to the Marketing Community?

For decades now, Google engineers and spokespeople have given marketers advice about how to rank better. That advice has been general. For the last several years, it’s basically boiled down to “don’t worry about the algorithm, just make good content.”

But often that advice seems to contradict what practitioners are seeing in the search results.

Click data is one of many clues

For instance, Google claims that click data isn’t considered a significant ranking factor. That might be true, though many outsiders who’ve tried to test this says it doesn’t seem to be.

Until now, we’ve just had to just take Google’s word for it.

But these documents show that the data is significant.

That, essentially, is what Mr. Azimi says caused him to leak these documents.

Maybe, but out of necessity

Mike King was one of two people who were first given the leak. He’s spent 18 years in the SEO industry and today runs the agency iPullRank.com

I spoke with him earlier today as well and asked him if this means the Google reps were just lying to marketers about what factors matter:

Or maybe even the reps didn’t know?

There is another possibility here too — that maybe the public-facing reps that Google uses to talk about SEO (the spokespeople, the evangelists, and liaisons) were inside the black box too, and didn’t know it.

What’s In the Documents

The debate about “was Google lying to marketers” aside, the documents do reveal a lot more about the inner workings of the search engine than we knew before.

Highlights

There are about 14,000+ ranking elements listed. The document did not detail the weighting of each element, just that they exist.

There is a metric called “siteAuthority” which hadn’t previously been disclosed and, based on name alone, seems to run counter to Google’s claim that broad site trustworthiness was not a strong ranking metric.

Content can be demoted in search ranking position if it’s a product page with bad reviews. We were able to infer this from one of Google’s recent updates, but nothing’s been this clear.

Google apparently keeps a copy of every version of every page it’s ever indexed, so it can go back to see what changes were made, though it only uses the last 20 content changes when analyzing links.

Yes, links to your content still matter — despite the direction away from them Google spokespeople have tried to steer marketers.

There are penalties for domain names that exactly match unbranded search queries (e.g.,. cheap-fashion-shoes.com or womens-luxury-watches.com). Use those domain names, and your ranking will drop.

It’ll be hard for Google to claim this is an out-of-date document; it seems to have been updated as recently as March.

Docs had been in plain view for two months

The leaker says the documentation came from Github, where software engineers store their code and documentation.

These API documents had been protected and only accessible by specific Google employees, but between March and this month, those documents had accidentally been left open to the public.

Think of it like a library, but as SEO veteran Rand Fishkin — who was the other person initially given this leak — said in his blog post about this all:

How much of it is actually in use?

As for how much of the code is actively being used by Google’s search engine, that’s hard to know for sure.

It’s possible Google have since deprecated some of these factors, some may have been internal only, or were test API calls that were never implemented.

But all that seems unlikely, since the code clearly notes when features have been sunsetted.

Should We Change Our SEO Strategies Now?

So, what now?

Given that some of the advice Google’s given us in the past seems to have been misdirection at best…

Should marketers change our SEO practices as a result of this?

“Build content that people like.”

“Think more about UX principles.”

For the record, we did reach out to Google for comment, but did not hear back by deadline.

More Reading

Google search is one of the most secretive, closely-guarded black boxes in the world. Well, maybe not anymore.

In the last quarter century, no leak of this magnitude or detail has ever been reported from Google’s search division. If you're in #SEO, you should probably see this.

— Rand Fishkin (follow @randderuiter on Threads) (@randfish)
May 28, 2024

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