You may have heard about the recent Google API documentation leaks, but the big questions on everyone’s mind are:
1. What was revealed?
2. What will it affect?
3. What are the effects?
4. How can I benefit?
Well, if you’re in marketing, especially SEO (search engine optimization), this leak is actually a big deal (in a good way!) as it may, actually, finally answer the question that we have all been wondering pretty much since the birth of Google itself: How do they rank content? As it turns out, based on the leaked information Google may have been giving us the Coles’ notes about their inner workings. In the past, they have repeatedly denied claims of their use of click-centric user signals, that subdomains are treated separately in rankings or that a website domain’s age is taken into consideration, just to name a few. The information released from the leak not only contradicts a lot of what we’ve previously believed about content rankings, but might just help us crack this code.
Despite Google publicly denying it, our suspicions have finally been confirmed that Google does in fact use site authority as a main factor in determining trust and value from backlinks when ranking web content. What this means in terms of SEO is that creating a larger, more diversified profile of backlinks from various trustworthy sources will likely yield higher perceived domain and site authority.
The data leaks show that Google uses Chrome and clickstream data to identify overall site quality. What this means is (and while it may seem obvious), the more useful content you publish, the more users you will naturally be able to attract. The more helpful the content, the more time users are likely to spend on your page, leading to better dwell time metrics, and a higher likelihood that users will visit other pages within your domain without returning to the SERP (search engine results page) for more information, and ultimately increase the chances of conversions or sales. The better your site performs, the better your engagement metrics, and your overall rankings will be.
While it has always been understood that prominent news publications have held high site authority and have historically had high PageRank scores, we have now learned from the leak that what are considered to be the highest-quality news sites receive a special tag - EncodedNewsAnchorData. This tag implies that links from deemed-to-be reputable news outlets like BBC or The New York Times hold more value and authority than other sites. But even if you’re not a news publication, you can still leverage their authority by using secure links from their sites to help with your own SEO.
Google’s algorithms are astute, capable of understanding and evaluating the topicality of entities, and by extension links. We now have confirmation that seed sites (a group of sites/pages that Google considers trusted and holding authority) are highly valued, so the closer your site relates to a seed site, the more highly valued your site by extension. What you may not have suspected, however, is that the PageRank-NearestSeeds attribute has now directly taken over from Pagerank, suggesting that links directly or closely related seed sites may rank higher and hold more value than others further away. Focusing on becoming a topical authority and collecting relevant links from seed sites can also be leveraged to improve SEO.
We should also be paying attention to link origins, as it has also been suggested that Google ranks links from within the same country higher than others, as determined by the localCountryCodes attribute from the AnchorsAnchorSource module. Using geographically relevant links will not improve your SEO, but (theoretically) should also increase local brand awareness and target a more local audience, ultimately driving more conversions/sales.
Based on the sourceType attribute, we now know that links containing newly published content are assigned higher value than older ones. This emphasizes the significance of producing and publishing content regularly to create fresh new links and ensure your site stays relevant, high-ranking and top of mind.
To sum up, while the leak may not have provided us with much new information that industry professionals hadn’t already suspected, it has confirmed many suspicions that Google has spent effort denying. So if you weren’t already implementing these tactics in your SEO strategy, you should start.
Sources:
