Joy in the SEO industry: Google may have inadvertently published documentation
How Google sorts search results is a well-kept trade secret. Now an accidental leak has probably provided valuable insights.
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Google has apparently inadvertently published thousands of pages documenting its own search engine technology, potentially providing the SEO industry with extremely valuable information. This has been made public by a US entrepreneur, who claims to have discovered from the information that some of the information contradicts what Google has been claiming for years about the basis of its search results lists. According to the information, these are explanations of Google's so-called "Content Warehouse API", which lists more than 14,000 attributes that Google uses to weight search results. It is not clear what weight they are given in each case. Google has not yet commented.
A goldmine for the SEO industry
The leak was made public by a man named Rand Fishkin, whose company SparkToro is dedicated to search engine optimization (SEO), among other things. In a long blog entry, he explains how he was made aware of the documentation that was apparently inadvertently posted on GitHub. It was probably posted by an automatic process on March 27 and taken down on May 7. Copies made during this time are still available online. They are likely to be extremely valuable for the SEO industry and ensure that much more background knowledge is used to bring websites to the top of Google's results lists.
According to the blog entry, the explanations contain several examples of attributes that Google uses for the weighting of websites, although Google has denied this in each case. The information would prove that Google does use clicks from users of the Chrome browser to improve search results. They also show that Google does include the age of a domain in its weighting. The documentation can be viewed online, but the US company has not yet commented. It remains to be seen what consequences the leak will have for the SEO industry.
(mho)