Thousands of documents belonging to Google reportedly leaked onto the web. These detail part of the operation of the search engine’s very secret indexing algorithm.
Since its creation in 1998, Google has always tried to keep its search algorithm secret. On the one hand to avoid giving the recipe for success to its competitors, but also to avoid seeing sites try to climb to the top of the results by cheating on the referencing criteria. Unfortunately for the company, it seems that part of this famous algorithm has leaked onto the web.
Google remains silent in the face of the leak
Rand Fishkin, an SEO expert, explains that he got his hands on thousands of documents detailing how the Google algorithm works. The latter would have been obtained due to their accidental posting on GitHub. Google has not confirmed the veracity of its documents, but many SEO experts seem to lend credence to this leak.
Concretely, these documents do not detail exactly how Google decides which site will appear at the top of search results. They simply list some of the many, many criteria taken into account for SEO. The search giant appears to take into account at least 14,000 different criteria when deciding who will make it to the top of its rankings. On the other hand, the weighting of these criteria has not been revealed, somewhat limiting the damage for Google.
Towards even more spam on Google?
Among the parameters taken into account in SEO, we find, unsurprisingly, the internal and external network of a site (i.e. its propensity to insert links both to its own site and to external resources), but also the taking into account the number of clicks on its links. In short, a site can be full of links, but people still need to click on them to send a positive signal to Google.
It also seems that Google pays particular attention to the “reputation” of a site when gauging its SEO, as well as the expertise of the author who creates the content on said site. Doubts also persist about the use of data from the Google Chrome browser to refine search results. A practice that Google has always denied engaging in (for obvious reasons of abuse of a dominant position), but which seems to rear its ugly head here and there in the code.
The documents themselves are relatively technical, not allowing everyone to understand the internal workings of the Google algorithm, but there is no doubt that SEO professionals will carefully examine this data in the coming weeks. As for whether this augurs an improvement in the relevance of Google’s results or, on the contrary, the arrival of an even more massive wave of poor quality content, only time will allow us to decide.
Source : sparktoro.com
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