Early in 2024, the SEO and digital marketing industry experienced excitement in the form of the release of internal Google documents providing insights into the workings of the Google Search Algorithm. These leaked documents reveal key factors that Google uses to rank content, which is one of the most important things that SEO professionals and Google Search users want to know!
The “Leak” Event of Google Search Documents
On March 13, 2024, a large number of internal documents from Google’s Content API Warehouse were published on Github by an automated bot named “yoshi-code-bot.” These documents were shared with Rand Fishkin, co-founder of SparkToro, and Michael King, CEO of iPullRank, who analyzed and shared important information from the documents.
What is the Google Algorithm?
For newcomers in the SEO world, it’s important to understand what the Google Algorithm is: the rules and procedures that Google uses to process and rank websites in search results. This algorithm considers hundreds of factors to determine which websites should appear in which position on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Of course, knowing the various algorithms that Google uses will help SEO professionals and businesses improve their websites to meet Google’s requirements, thereby increasing their ranking.
Now that we know this, let’s see what the leaked documents have told us.
What We Learned from the Leaked Google Documents
1. Ranking Modules
The documents reveal that there are 2,596 ranking modules and as many as 14,014 features.
2. Twiddlers
These are new re-ranking functions that can adjust the search retrieval score of a website or change the ranking of a website.
3. Demotion Rules
A website’s content may be demoted for various reasons, such as links not matching the target website, SERP Signals indicating user dissatisfaction, product reviews, location not matching the user, or having pornographic content on the website.
4. History of Changes
The documents revealed that Google keeps copies of every version of each webpage that has ever been indexed, but only uses the 20 latest changes to a URL for analysis.
Google Search Algorithm: Key Factors in Ranking
Interesting Things About the Google Algorithm
- Data from Chrome: A module named ChromeInTotal indicates that Google uses data from the Chrome browser for ranking.
- Whitelists: Google has exemptions lists for domains related to elections and COVID.
- Small Websites: There is a feature called smallPersonalSite for small personal websites or blogs, which Google may choose to boost the ranking of these websites through a Twiddler.
- Content Freshness Matters: Google looks at the date in the bylineDate, URL (syntacticDate), and content on the page (semanticDate).
- Main Topic of a Website: Google compares the Embeddings of a page (siteRadius) with the Embeddings of a website (siteFocusScore) to determine whether the content being analyzed is the main content of the website.
- Importance of Page Title: Google has a feature called titlematchScore, which is believed to be an indicator of how well the page title (Page Title) matches the search query.
Impact on Digital Marketers and SEO Professionals
This release of information may have a significant impact on how digital marketers and SEO professionals plan their strategies. With a greater understanding of how the Google Search Algorithm works, marketers can better tailor their strategies to align with the factors that Google prioritizes. However, it is important to consider that these documents do not specify how much weight each factor has in ranking. Therefore, marketers should use this information as a guideline for improving their SEO strategies, but should not neglect creating quality content and providing a good user experience.
Conclusion
The leak of these internal Google Search documents has revealed valuable insights into how the Google Search Algorithm works. Even though we don’t know the exact weight of each metric, this information is a valuable guideline for digital marketers and SEO professionals to improve their strategies.
However, Google Algorithm Updates continue to occur, and what we learn from these documents may change in the future. Therefore, keeping up with the latest changes and adapting continuously is essential for long-term SEO success.
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