Googling manages most of the Internet activities. The American company is the one who decides which links are visible to the user and which ones are ultimately demoted to virtually nothing. And now we know that much of what he has been saying for years about the functioning of this system is far from reality. This has become clear after the recent one publication of 2,500 internal company documents.
The leak, made a few days ago by SEO expert Mike King and the co-founder of the analytics company Sparktoro, Rand Fishkin, is completely true. The company itself, which did not want to make any statements about it to ABC, has acknowledged it to the specialized media.The edge'. And the conclusion, for the professionals who work to ensure that the current website is clearly visible in the search engine, after reviewing the documentation, is clear: Google has been deliberately missing the truth about how Search works for some time.
“Google stated that there were systems that didn't exist or that didn't work in a specific way, and now thanks to the leak we've seen that it really wasn't what they said. In this documentation, concepts appear that we experts talked about and that in theory did not exist,” says Guillermo Gascón, co-founder of the web development company The Cookies and SEO expert, who had the opportunity to assess the leak, explains it to ABC.
The website that publishes it carries more weight than what was said
What has caught Gascón's attention the most is the fact that the search engine Search, where about 90% of current users conduct searches, has a figure called domain authority that has a significant impact on the results that allow a web page to be trimmed. That is, despite denying it, the search engine highly values the specific page that publishes content on the Internet when it positions a URL higher or lower.
«The company values an entire website, not just a URL. What Google explained to us is that each URL on the page would have its own authority, its own value that evolves over time. Not the website itself, and what this leak shows is that this was not the case. It's something that worked without us knowing for sure,” says the SEO expert.
Clicks are very important
Search also takes into account the number of visits a URL receives when it is properly positioned and shown to a larger number of users. “In theory, this was something that wasn't the case. Google had never said it before and it is something that is very shocking,” says Gascón. This system can ultimately lead to the viralization of low-quality content that simply has the ability to attract users' attention and downgrade higher quality publications instead.
However, the expert does not believe that Search is not necessarily interested in the most processed product. “I believe that the company is interested in the URL that provides quality information, of which there is no doubt that this detail in particular shows that the search engine also highly rewards 'clicks', something that was not in the SEO guides when positioning of a URL. And it is a system that ultimately has nothing to do with the quality of a publication,” says the co-founder of The Cookies.
If your website is new, you have a problem
Google likes domains with a track record. When a company starts a new project on the Internet, it can be a near-impossible mission to gain a good position in the jungle of URLs, the leaked documents show. Gascón says in this regard that “competing for the new ones will be much more complicated, 100%”: “This is something that we SEOs have been aware of for a long time, even if Google has always denied it.”
“Projects succeed when Google deems that the project has reached sufficient maturity to serve you in search results and generate traffic. Once again, the company never recognized it,” the SEO explains.
Search data
If Search is users' favorite search engine, Chrome, also from Google, is also the most used browser. The American technology company collects data from this when assessing the quality of a website.
In theory, Chrome had no impact on website rankings, but now we know it intersects with Search when ranking content. Something that, again, was not the case in theory. “It's strange, to say the least, that they're using Chrome in this way to improve their business, and it's already known that Google has had a lot of trouble lately due to accusations that it's operating as a monopoly,” Gascón says.