Today in Digital Marketing - Everything You Need to Know About the Huge Google Search Leak

Starting point is 00:00:00 It is Tuesday, May 28th. Today, it's the biggest leak in Google's history, and the documents in it detail thousands of previously secret factors that decide how high you rank in their search engine. What are those factors? And have marketers been lied to all this time? We have extensive coverage today in this special episode. I'm Todd Maffin. That's Ahead, today in digital marketing.

Starting point is 00:00:28 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. Hi there. Only, this is no job interview. This is the guy... I'm the guy... Who this past weekend leaked Google's most important trade secrets.

Starting point is 00:00:54 Because he's mad. Over a decade, we've been lied to. Literally lied. His name is Efran Azimi, and today he uploaded a video revealing that he was the person behind the massive weekend leak of internal Google search documents that 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,

Starting point is 00:01:32 detailing Google's secret sauce, the parameters and levers that run their money printing search engine. We are devoting our full episode to this leak today, what's in it, and what it means for you going forward. First, though, a bit of background. 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. 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

Starting point is 00:02:16 says it doesn't seem to be. Until now, we've just had to take Google's word for it. That, essentially, is what Mr. Azimi says caused him to leak these documents. As Googlers came and directly said, especially from the search relations team, that certain signals, such as Chrome data and click data,

Starting point is 00:02:43 are not used in the ranking. This is massive. Barry Schwartz has been covering the SEO industry for most of his career. He writes at seroundtable.com. I spoke with him this morning. It looks to be a legit release of Google's search factors of some sort in a real structured fashion. So people can actually search it and so forth. It seems like a lot of the specific signals that Google may be using in some level for rankings has been fully released to the public, which is Google's secret sauce, really. Mike King was one of two people who were first given the leak. He spent 18 years in the SEO

Starting point is 00:03:19 industry. Today, he runs the agency iPollrank.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. of information, they have some wiggle room to say things that misdirect us. And so I think something like saying that clicks don't impact rankings is something they have to say because they don't want everyone trying to manipulate clicks. Like that is their core signal that you're using to reinforce what should rank. And so if everyone goes out there and they just like make a bunch of bots to click on things, then that signal is no longer valuable. So I don't think they've lied to us necessarily

Starting point is 00:04:14 out of animosity or anything like that. I think they had to, but I think the problem is the way that they've done it. There is another possibility here too, that maybe the public facing reps that Google uses to talk with us about SEO, spokespeople, the evangelists, the liaisons, maybe they were inside the black box too and didn't even know it. Tom Capper is senior search scientist at Moz.com. I wonder to what extent, you know, the people that are

Starting point is 00:04:43 employed by Google to communicate with the SEO industry, I wonder to what extent, you know, the people that are employed by Google to communicate with the SEO industry, I wonder to what extent they're in the dark here. Did they know that they were lying or has this stuff been a secret within Google? Lying might be a strong and judgmental word. Did they know that they weren't saying the whole truth, shall we say, or were the firewalls within Google so substantial that actually they were being saying the whole truth, shall we say? Or were the firewalls within Google so substantial that actually they were being given the same information that SEOs were? I could believe something like that. The debate about was Google lying to marketers aside,

Starting point is 00:05:16 the documents do reveal a lot more about the inner workings of the search engine than we knew before. Here are some of those highlights. First, 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 site authority, which hadn't been previously disclosed and, based on name alone, seems to run counter to Google's claim that broad site trustworthiness was not a strong ranking metric. Third, 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. Fourth, Google apparently keeps a copy of every version of every page it's ever indexed, so it can go back and see what

Starting point is 00:06:06 changes were made, though it only uses the last 20 content changes when analyzing links. Fifth, yes, links to your content still matter, despite the direction away from them Google spokespeople have tried to steer marketers. And sixth, there are penalties for domain names that exactly match unbranded search queries. For example, cheapfashionshoes.com or womensluxurywatches.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. The leaker says the documentation came from GitHub, where software engineers store their code and documentation.

Starting point is 00:06:49 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, quote, whereas libraries are public, Google search is one of the most secretive, closely guarded black boxes in the world. In the last quarter century, no leak of this magnitude or detail has ever been reported from Google's search division, unquote. As for how much of the code is actively being used by Google's search engine,

Starting point is 00:07:31 that's hard to know for sure. It's possible Google has 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, partially because the code clearly notes when features have been sunsetted. So what now? Given that some of the advice Google's given us in the past seems to have been misdirection at best,

Starting point is 00:07:55 should marketers change our SEO practices because of this? I don't see why. Again, Barry Schwartz. I don't see there's no reason to change your strategies. Ultimately, you want to build content that people like, that people want to click on,

Starting point is 00:08:06 that people want to consume, that people want to share, that people just want to go back to. So ultimately, it's all in line with building out great content because that's the type of stuff that generates clicks, generates visits. People have long divorced SEO from user experience. This is Mike King again. I think the two need to work more closely together because ultimately you need someone to like come to your page and stay there. Like that is a signal that Google is using. Historically, we've all just been like, cool,

Starting point is 00:08:34 let's just get them to the site, get them to the site and then, you know, leave the conversion to someone else. I think that we need to be thinking more about UX principles and how do we ensure that people get to the thing that they're looking for so that we can drive more successful sessions. Barry Schwartz is at seroundtable.com. Mike King is at ipullrank.com. And Tom Capa works at moz.com. For the record, we did reach out to Google for comment, but did not hear back by deadline. We have even more detail about these documents in today's email newsletter, including links to Barry's coverage, Rand Fishkin's full blog post, and Mike King's breakdown of what's in the docs. You can get all that by signing up to the newsletter for free by tapping the link at the top of today's show notes or going to todayindigital.com slash newsletter.

Starting point is 00:09:26 Tomorrow, we will update this story with any reaction from Google on all this, if they comment. Plus, back to other stories making news this week, including PayPal's aggressive new push into the ad market. I'm Todd Mathen. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

Today in Digital Marketing - Everything You Need to Know About the Huge Google Search Leak

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