If you are interested in any way in the worlds of SEO -- black, white, and every shade in between -- you are going to be aware of the massive leak of what looks like internal documentation about search. For an SEO, this is almost Holy Grail level stuff. Although it doesn’t detail how or even which of the factors that Google is collecting data on determines the rank of an individual page, it’s safe to say that it’s all in here, somewhere.
A lot of the initial focus of posts about the leak has been on the fact it shows that many of the factors Google has consistently claimed not to use for ranking signals are, in fact, being collected -- and so are likely to be ranking signals. This includes everything from individual author authority through to the overall authority of a site.
So... Google has been lying. But the reality is I don’t know a single SEO practitioner in the publishing space who believed this stuff anyway. We all knew that making it obvious that a writer had authority in a particular topic would gain you ranking. We all knew that sites themselves had some kind of measure of authority. We all knew that freshness matters (who amongst us has not gamed updates to increase the freshness of content?)
Everyone who has worked around the Google space has known which of the company’s pronouncements to take at face value and which to look at with a raised eyebrow.
I will leave it to others to pick over the bones of this and work out what matters and what doesn’t. While I still keep an eye on the SEO world, part of me thinks that the era of publisher SEO is drawing to a close, as traffic from search inevitably declines and Google turns from the world’s biggest referrer into the global answers machine.
Although its initial foray into AI answers on the page has run headlong into some issues, the direction of travel is clear. I would strongly advise anyone who is spending too much time snickering about dumb answers not to be too complacent. AI probably isn’t going to end up coming for everyone’s jobs, but sooner or later it is going to come for your traffic.
