GOOGLE’s 14,000 Search Ranking Features Leaked… Search algorithm exposed

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Aleyda Solis has a quick summary on X where she summed up part of the leak:

 

  • There are 14K ranking features and more in the docs
  • Google has a feature they compute called “siteAuthority”
  • Navboost has a specific module entirely focused on click signals representing users as voters and their clicks are stored as their votes
  • Google stores which result has the longest click during the session
  • Google has an attribute called hostAge that is used specifically “to sandbox fresh spam in serving time”
  • One of the modules related to page quality scores features a site-level measure of views from Chrome

 

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-data-leak-37462.html

Google’s search algorithm is perhaps the most consequential system on the internet, dictating what sites live and die and what content on the web looks like. But how exactly Google ranks websites has long been a mystery, pieced together by journalists, researchers, and people working in search engine optimization.

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Now, an explosive leak that purports to show thousands of pages of internal documents appears to offer an unprecedented look under the hood of how Search works — and suggests that Google hasn’t been entirely truthful about it for years. So far, Google hasn’t responded to multiple requests for comment on the legitimacy of the documents.

Rand Fishkin, who worked in SEO for more than a decade, says a source shared 2,500 pages of documents with him with the hopes that reporting on the leak would counter the “lies” that Google employees had shared about how the search algorithm works. The documents outline Google’s search API and break down what information is available to employees, according to Fishkin.

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The details shared by Fishkin are dense and technical, likely more legible to developers and SEO experts than the layperson. The contents of the leak are also not necessarily proof that Google uses the specific data and signals it mentions for search rankings. Rather, the leak outlines what data Google collects from webpages, sites, and searchers and offers indirect hints to SEO experts about what Google seems to care about, as SEO expert Mike King wrote in his overview of the documents.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/28/24166177/google-search-ranking-algorithm-leak-documents-link-seo