A major leak of internal documents that purportedly reveals the inner workings of Google’s search algorithm has sent shock waves through the tech industry and the search engine optimization (SEO) community.
The Verge Reports The 2,500-page leaked documents allegedly offer an unprecedented glimpse into how Google’s long-mysterious search algorithm ranks websites. This process was shared with Rand Fishkin, an SEO expert with over 10 years of experience, by a source who believes the leaked documents are “lies” spread by Google employees about how the search algorithm works.
“We’re going to have to build a language model that’s more flexible than the traditional language model,” Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai said at the Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, U.S., Wednesday, May 10, 2023. Google unveiled PaLM 2, a new large-scale language model used to train artificial intelligence tools such as chatbots, and said it has already built the model into many of the company’s flagship products. Photo by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
While the leaked information may be highly technical and accessible to developers and SEO experts, it offers valuable insight into the data Google collects from web pages, sites, and searchers. SEO expert Mike King said that while the documents don’t conclusively prove that Google uses the mentioned data and signals for search rankings, they do provide indirect clues about what the company considers important.
The leaks concern various aspects of Google’s search algorithms, including how they handle sensitive topics like elections, how they treat small websites, the types of data they collect and use, etc. Notably, as both Fishkin and King point out, some of the information seems to contradict public statements made by Google representatives.
“‘Lie’ is a harsh term, but it’s the only accurate word we can use here,” King wrote in his analysis of the documents. “While I don’t necessarily blame Google representatives for protecting their company’s proprietary information, I do take issue with the company’s efforts to actively discredit those in marketing, technology, and journalism who have published reproducible findings.”
Google has not publicly disputed the legitimacy of the leaked documents, despite multiple requests for comment from The Verge, but a Google employee contacted Fishkin to ask him to amend some of the wording in his post regarding his characterization of certain events.
The search giant’s secretive algorithms have spawned an entire industry of marketers who strictly follow Google’s published guidelines to optimize the websites of millions of businesses around the world. The widespread use of these tactics has led to a perception that Google search results are suffering and filled with low-quality content that website owners are forced to create to maintain visibility.
The leaked documents call into question the accuracy of Google’s public statements about how search works. For example, Google representatives have repeatedly stated that Chrome data is not used to rank pages, yet the documents specifically mention Chrome in a section discussing how websites appear in search results.
Another point of contention is the role of EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) in rankings. Google representatives have previously said that EEAT is not a ranking factor, but documentation indicates that Google collects author data from pages, and that there is a field that indicates whether an entity on a page is an author.
Click here for details The Verge is here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering free speech and online censorship.
