Google's secret has finally been revealed, it seems. The tech giant has always been highly secretive about this search algorithm. However, the API documents of Google's search algorithm have apparently been leaked by someone now. And this gives the SEO world hope that the Google Search algo has finally been cracked. Rand Fishkin, SEO expert and the CEO of a marketing research firm, recently received an anonymous email that claimed to have access to the API documents running into more than 2,500 pages and containing 14,014 attributes or API features.
He had his own suspicions, Fishkin wrote in a blog, but he connected with the sender of the email over a video call. The sender was Erfan Azimi, founder of a digital marketing agency and an SEO practitioner himself.
Let us now go over the information for which all of us have been waiting — the boxes that need to be ticked if you wish to bring more traffic to your website.
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What Matters In Google Search Algorithm — Tick These Boxes
Domain Authority: There have been several instances in the past when Google has explicitly said that the domain authority of a website is not a focal point for it to appear at the top of the search page. On the other hand, Google has a feature known as 'Site Authority'. However, there is very little clarity about how the metrics in these are calculated.
Click-Driven Boost: Previously, Google also asserted that clicks are not used as a way to calculate ranking but, there is solid evidence that suggests clicks indeed are a part of those metrics. According to a SparkToro report by Rand Fishkin, Pandu Nayak, Vice President of Search at Google, during his testimony at the Department of Justice (DOJ) antitrust trial in November last year, spoke about the NavBoost and Glue ranking systems. Nayak said both of these employ click-driven ways to boost, demote or reinforce a ranking in search. He revealed that Google has been employing NavBoost since 2005 and historically used 18 months of click data. The representatives of Google have stated earlier that “dwell time” was not a feature but, Navboost on the other hand does indeed consider long clicks which is similar.
Chrome Data: Google is also likely using Chrome data to determine rankings, but this is something that they had denied earlier.
Twiddlers: SEO veteran and CEO of a marketing agency, iPullRank, Mike King, also received the API documents of the Google Search algorithm. He talked about another function which matters in the SEO ranking system, 'Twiddlers'. He described 'Twiddlers' as re-ranking functions. In order to explain this in a better way, let us take the example of another Google user, Debarghya Das. Das on X once stated that he had disabled twiddlers without realising that “all of YouTube search depended on it,” the Hindu reported.
Authored Articles: King also said that Google stores the author’s name of the article. As per the SparkToro article, Google can identify authors and treats them as entities in the system. Thus, building up one’s influence as an author online may indeed lead to ranking benefits in Google.
This leak at Google is not something to be worried about, but this surely serves as a reminder for us to not take the company’s word at its face value. After around two days of the leak, Google did admit that the data was 100 per cent theirs but it then “cautioned against making inaccurate assumptions about Search based on out-of-context, outdated, or incomplete information".
Some of us now might be wondering how this leak even happened in the first place.
How Was The Document Leaked
According to the report, the document shared by Azimi showed a “yoshi-code-bot /elixer-google-api” as the origin which meant that it was Google’s own internal Content API Warehouse that published it accidentally. The code was published for the world to see on March 27 and it was removed after May 7.
The document did not share the exact detail as to what works the Search algorithm but it has definitely given us a checklist of some factors that matter significantly.