There is a potentially massive leak of its search algorithm documentation

Google Protects Public Information in SEO: Comment on vogue.com, by David Fishkin, Sgr. J.D. King, Algorithms and Analogues

Google’s secretive search algorithm has birthed an entire industry of marketers who closely follow Google’s public guidance and execute it for millions of companies around the world. The pervasive, often annoying tactics have led to a general narrative that Google Search results are getting worse, crowded with junk that website operators feel required to produce to have their sites seen. In response to The Verge’s past reporting on the SEO-driven tactics, Google representatives often fall back to a familiar defense: that’s not what the Google guidelines say.

Davis Thompson told The Verge that they would caution people not to make assumptions about Search based on incomplete or out-of-context information. We have given a lot of information about how Search works, the types of factors we weigh and how we protect our results from manipulation.

“‘Lied’ is harsh, but it’s the only accurate word to use here,” King writes. I don’t fault Google’s public representatives for protecting their proprietary information, but I do take issue with their efforts to actively detract from people in marketing, technology, and journalism who have presented reproducible discoveries.

There is an example of the data being used in ranking. The Chrome data is mentioned in sections about how websites appear in Search, but it isn’t used to rank pages. In the screenshot below, which I captured as an example, the links appearing below the main vogue.com URL may be created in part using Chrome data, according to the documents.

What role does E-E-A-T play in ranking? E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, a Google metric used to evaluate the quality of results. Google representatives have previously said E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor. Fishkin says he has not found much in the documents about E-E-A-T.

King, however, detailed how Google appears to collect author data from a page and has a field for whether an entity on the page is the author. A portion of the documents shared by King reads that the field was “mainly developed and tuned for news articles… but is also populated for other content (e.g., scientific articles).” Though this doesn’t confirm that bylines are an explicit ranking metric, it does show that Google is at least keeping track of this attribute. Author by lines are something website owners should do in order to make their site more appealing to readers, not because they affect rankings.