On May 5th, Moz founder Rand Fishkin received an email from an anonymous source containing documents leaked, including the internal version of the deprecated Document AI Warehouse. These documents reveal over 14,000 internal ranking features, a significant discovery for the SEO world.
Leak Overview:
The documents first appeared on GitHub, mistakenly uploaded by an automated bot named Yoshi-code-bot. They were then emailed to Rand Fishkin by SEO practitioner Erfan Azimi, who sought to refute Google’s public claims. The authenticity of the documents was confirmed by multiple experts, including Mike King, founder of iPullRank, and other Google insiders.
Key Findings:
- Backlinks’ Importance: Google’s PageRank algorithm, crucial for backlinks, is still active. This directly contradicts Gary Illyes’ claim that ‘links weren’t a top 3 ranking factor’. Documentation from the leak proves that backlinks move the SEO needle, as every document has its homepage PageRank associated with it. Backlinks are considered for the ranking of every single web page, and the algorithm checks for relevance on both sides.
- Indexing Tiers: A metric called sourceType correlates the quality of a link to its indexing tier. Google’s index is broken into high, medium, and low-quality tiers. Web pages in the highest tier are high-quality, frequently visited, and regularly updated websites that get stored in flash memory. Quality sites that are deemed less important get stored on solid-state drives (medium tier), and low-quality sites that are rarely updated are stored on standard hard drives. This emphasizes targeting backlinks from trusted, high-quality websites.
- Anchor Text Spam: Google uses metrics to measure spikes in anchor text spam, such as phraseAnchorSpamCount, indicating how many spam phrases are found in the anchors among unique domains. This highlights the need for balanced anchor text ratios and shows how Google identifies and devalues negative SEO attacks.
- Domain Authority: Despite previous denials, Google uses a metric similar to Moz’s Domain Authority for ranking websites. This metric, called siteAuthority, is computed for every website, putting to rest any doubts about its existence.
- Font Size for Keywords and Backlinks: The avgTermWeight metric tracks the average weighted font size for keywords and backlink anchor text. This surprising finding validates an ancient SEO technique where optimizers would bold, underline, and increase the font size of keywords.
- Content Demotions: The documentation revealed numerous ways that Google’s algorithm can demote content in its search rankings. Factors include irrelevant links, user dissatisfaction signals (indicated by SERP signals), exact match domains, negative product reviews, and inappropriate content.
Implications for SEO:
This leak confirms the importance of backlinks, domain authority, and other factors in Google’s ranking system. SEO strategies may need to adjust significantly in light of these revelations. The true workings of Google’s algorithm involve a complex interplay of numerous factors, many of which have now been validated by the leaked documents.
For more information, contact Rachel Hernandez at rachel@thehoth.com
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