Google has confirmed that a massive leak of around 2,500 internal documents related to its search engine is authentic, with one expert saying the trove shows “what Google says and does is one thing” when it comes to its mysterious algorithm.
The tech giant has huge influence over the flow of information, traffic and advertising revenue online, yet has remained secretive about how its search engine works.
Some details appeared to contradict past public statements by Google employees about which factors are and aren’t used to calculate rankings.
For example, in 2016, a Google Search employee said: The company does not have a “website authority score.”
The company also Explicitly denying use of Chrome data for search rankings.
However, information in the document suggests that Google takes into account click-through rates, data from the Chrome web browser, website size and something called “domain authority” – a measure of a website’s importance or relevance on a particular subject – when determining rankings.
“The key takeaway here is that what Google says and what it does are different things,” Michael King, CEO of iPullRank, which published the first analysis of the data trove, told The Washington Post.
“These documents really make that very clear,” King added. “We don’t know what recipes Google is using to search, but it’s very clear what the ingredients are.”
Some experts, including from industry publication Search Engine Land, have noted that the documents mention a module that suggests Google will implement “whitelists” for certain topics, such as searches related to elections (IsElectionAuthority) and the COVID-19 pandemic (IsCovidLocalAuthority).
King said the references were likely Google’s attempt to identify “quality sources” on particular subjects.
documents It is said to contain over 14,000 ranking factors. It’s a factor that Google considers when sorting through websites, and it’s aimed at everyone from news publishers like The Post to small business owners.
The internal data was reportedly published on the online code repository GitHub in March, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Expert Rand Fishkin and Michael Hill is another breakdown.
King said the documents represent “the biggest leak of Google search ever.”
“This is the largest, most transparent investigation into Google’s capabilities that we’ve ever seen,” King said.
Google tacitly acknowledged that the documents were authentic, but warned that they lacked important context and should not be used by the public to gain insight into how search works.
“We want to be careful not to make inaccurate inferences about searches based on information that is out of context, out of date or incomplete,” Google spokesman Davis Thompson said in a statement.
“We have shared extensive information about how search works and the types of factors our system weighs, and have worked to protect the integrity of our search results from manipulation,” the statement added.
Google also warned that the documents are not a comprehensive, relevant or up-to-date view of its search ranking algorithms.
It remains to be seen whether Google has actually implemented all of the ranking factors detailed in the document, or whether it was simply testing and experimenting with them — some factors may never have been used at all.
Even if they were used, it’s essentially impossible to assess how important they are to creating what users see in search results.
The document does not clarify how the ranking features will be weighted.
Barry Schwartz, a well-known SEO expert and owner of web consultancy RustyBrick, said the leaked documents offer a fascinating but incomplete look at the company’s inner workings of search.
Schwartz said the documents are best viewed as a glimpse into “what Google is thinking” about online search.
“All of that is there about how Google does it with certain factors like links, quality of content, authority, authorship,” Schwartz said. “The problem is, we don’t know how they’re weighting those, how important these signals are, or if they’re even being used. And that’s the problem.”
