For more than 25 years, precisely how Google organizes the Web has been one of the Internet’s greatest unsolved mysteries.
Google is the gateway to the Internet that many businesses depend on, but its ever-changing algorithms have remained closely guarded behind lock and key.
Until this week, when the black box was finally opened.
A trove of 2,500 documents containing coveted secrets about how Google ranks its search results began circulating among a handful of search engine optimization experts, who shared them more widely on Monday. The company confirmed that the hardware was real.
The already frenzied SEO community kicked into gear, with social media sites and industry forums buzzing.
Soon the frenzy turned to fury, with some SEO experts saying the documents showed Google hadn’t always been honest when answering questions about how it ranked websites.
“It’s 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 said he first came across the materials online, posted a dramatic 13-minute YouTube video. For Azim and many others in the SEO community, some details from the leak appear to confirm their suspicions: Google may not have been entirely honest about the most important signals that determine which sites appear in the top half coveted top of the search engine results page. .
“For over a decade we have been lied to,” Azimi said, looking into the camera lens. “The truth must come out.”
Yet the most dedicated SEO code hackers have yet to determine how up-to-date the information is or which of the apparent 14,000 ranking factors has even come into existence.
A Google spokesperson said the documents lacked context and the operation of its systems could change frequently. They declined to comment on specific fields in the data.
“We advise against making inaccurate assumptions about search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement.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 a lot of information about how research works and the types of factors our systems take into account, while striving to protect the integrity of our results from manipulation.”
The leak has stoked more distrust of Google as it prepares to rewrite the rules. While Google promises to “do Google search for you” with its summaries powered by generative artificial intelligence, many website owners are preparing for a future in which the company sucks up their content and delivers no visitors at all. back.
“As AI takes over the world, does anyone know how it works?” said Gareth Hoyle, managing director of marketing agency Marketing Signals. “Who guards the guards?”
Why Google keeps search secret
Google employees are given strict instructions to remain silent regarding research. An internal presentation to employees, which surfaced last year during Google’s Justice Department antitrust trial, directed staff to continue discussions about the company’s most popular product “based on need to know”.
“Anything we disclose will be used against us by SEOs, patent hunters, competitors, etc.,” the presentation reads. “Search issues can inflame world leaders who have power over Google, demand congressional hearings, etc.” he added.
Here’s 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 crawlers 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. Google
Beyond that, how Google determines “good” or “useful” content, where keywords should be placed, and how high links should appear on web pages is an ever-evolving mystery. Enter the world of SEO, where practitioners conduct rigorous testing, exchange tips and theories at conferences, and lobby their Google representatives and its dedicated “public search liaison” on which ranking factors they should give the most weight. For some SEOs, the documents show they would have been better off sticking to their own assumptions.
Take clicks. SEO experts have long believed that Google analyzes when and how often a website gets clicks to determine its ranking. The leaked documents refer to “goodClicks” and “unsquashedClicks,” terms that SEOs say could show that Google is measuring clicks more heavily than it has let on in the past.
“One thing I took away from all of this is that Google is, in fact, using click data a lot more than we thought,” said Grace Frohlich, an SEO consultant at digital marketing agency Brainlabs.
Then there’s domain authority – an assessment of the quality and trustworthiness of a site in relation to a relevant topic. Google has previously stated that it does not use domain authority as a ranking factor, but the documents refer to a factor called “siteAuthority.”
The documents also refer to the signifiers “isElectionAuthority” and “isCovidLocalAuthority,” suggesting that Google may rank certain sites as more authoritative on these topics.
Or take Google’s Chrome browser. The company has said in the past that it doesn’t use browsing data picked up by Chrome to rank websites. But several references to Chrome in the documents have convinced SEO experts that Google has, in fact, used its popular browser to help rank the web (given how closely regulators are scrutinizing Google’s possible use of Google tactics). self-preference to boost search and its advertising activity, you can see why the company might be coy about it).
“The big picture just highlights the areas where we were right, and Google was telling us we were wrong,” said Michael King, founder and CEO of digital marketing agency iPullRank.
Some in the SEO community are hesitant to read too much into the leak. Aleyda Solís, founder of SEO company Orainti, where she is an SEO consultant, warned that some people might see what they wanted in documents and that it was unclear how Google “weighs” factors like as clicks or other values.
“We don’t even know if all of them are taken into account as real ranking factors,” Solís said.
“We are already on ice”
The relationship between SEOs and Google had already become frosty. Some business owners have reported catastrophic drops in traffic to their websites following two recent major updates to the Google search algorithm in the space of a few months, while sites such as Reddit and Quora flooded the top of search results pages.
Google’s downsizing has also reduced the number of human representatives SEOs can access. Although Google throws lavish parties for its advertising clients, such as the popular YouTube Brandcast, it does not make similar investments in events aimed at the SEO community. This has led some community members to lament a breakdown in the relationship between the search giant and the experts who helped it organize all this information.
“We’re already on very thin ice with them,” said Amsive’s Ray.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai at last year’s Google I/O. JOSH EDELSON/GETTY
All of this comes as Google moves full steam ahead with AI generative search. Its recent testing of AI-generated summaries in US search results became a laughing stock when the search engine took inspiration from satirical websites and Reddit posts to suggest eating rocks for purposes nutritional values and use glue so that the cheese sticks to the pizza. Google initially claimed that the AI only produced such answers for uncommon queries, but later said it was “taking prompt action” to manually remove bad answers that violated its content policy.
While the search leak doesn’t radically change the way websites play Google’s game and doesn’t necessarily reflect how Google ranks the web today, SEOs should carefully monitor whether the rules gleaned from the documents s will apply in the new world order of AI research. . For example, Rand Fishkin, CEO and co-founder of audience research company SparkToro, wrote that the documents showed that Google was on an “inexorable path” to drive more traffic to big brand websites rather than small publishers.
Eric Hoover, SEO director at digital agency Jellyfish, said the leak confirming content quality should always trump attempts to outsmart the algorithm.
“It 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 crack the code in the tons of documents now in public view. They don’t rely on anyone in the company to give them a helping hand.
“I think this will ultimately inform better correlation studies that we do in our space,” King said. “But I think it could also mean that Google talks to us less.”