What the Leaked Google Documents Reveal About SEO
Everyone is talking about the latest Google leaks and what the future of SEO will look like from now on.
We are all aware of how competitive the online world is. All of us are trying to stay afloat, improve our visibility, and get found on the internet. Everything we change and improve regarding our SEO is to enhance our website visibility and performance.
That’s why staying on top of the latest changes and developments in SEO is extremely important.
Google’s algorithm is one of the most complex systems out there, deciding which websites/pages live to see the light of the top positions or die and never come back up.
We still do not have a clear idea of how Google ranks websites, but the latest leaks show us some methods we were and were not doing right. And most importantly, we were given a glimpse into how to take advantage of this knowledge.
The SEO community is now stressing over these leaks and trying to improve their strategies and update their knowledge.
Relevance to Us and Our Clients
These leaks have given us a fresh perspective on how to stay ahead of the game. While we are still shifting through the data, we will use all this knowledge to help our clients grow and improve our strategies.
Here are the topics we found most interesting from the Google leaks, along with some debunked SEO myths:
Content Quality and Creation
AI Content and Originality
If you have ever asked yourself, “Can AI content be detected?” or “Can Google detect AI-generated content?” just know that Google can only suspect, rather than definitively identify, AI-generated content. AI-content detection has a systematic and logical way of discovering text likely written with AI tools. Again, likely written, not definitely written. So, some of these detection tools can sometimes be wrong.
They are trained on tons and tons of human-written and machine-generated text, looking at style, tone, vocabulary, and randomness. Then, the detection tools use this data to compare the given text with human or machine-generated text and determine the similarities. AI detectors use two primary factors: randomness and structure.
Randomness refers to how predictable the text and the words are. Human-written text is more predictable than AI-generated text.
Structure refers to the length of the sentences and the placement of the words in a sentence. AI often lack creativity and variety. That is why AI content reads and looks dry, monotonous, or repetitive.
We recommend using AI as a base for your projects/blog structure and content.
Original Content
We all know that Google values original and high-quality content. High-quality content should provide a fresh perspective or opinion to the users, allowing them to see a topic from a different standpoint.
Long-Form Content
We all heard that long-form tends to perform better in search results, as it has more information and acts as a one-stop information hub. However, short-form content has an equal chance of ranking if it provides accurate and high-quality knowledge.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content is indeed an issue. On top of harming your UX by frustrating users who find the same information on different pages, it will confuse search engines and potentially dilute the ranking power of your pages.
On-Page SEO Factors
Page Updates (Freshness)
Fresh content and frequent updates matter. However, how often you should update your content is based on the competitiveness of your niche and used keywords. Highly competitive keywords and niches require frequent updates.
Page Intent
Another ranking factor is page intent. Though you can optimise your pages for one or multiple intents, Google will ultimately choose the intent based on its own criteria. This also means that Google can exclude the page from appearing in search results for other intents.
Titles and Keywords
The 70-characters rule has been debunked. You do not need to worry anymore about titles that are too long. However, we should not start having paragraphs for titles. It is best to keep it relevant, descriptive, and a reasonable length.
User Engagement and Experience
Successful Clicks and User Experience (UX)
According the latest Google leaks, successful clicks represent another ranking factor. These happen when users click and access your website and spend some time scrolling, clicking, and viewing your content.
SEO experts emphasise how SEO (driving users to your website) and UX (convincing users that it is worth staying on the website) should be top priorities when changing or improving content/pages. Google uses successful clicks as part of its ranking system.
Google will also use these clicks when deciding if the page is relevant to users and their queries based on previous page interactions.
Backlinks and Authority
Toxic Backlinks
Toxic backlinks are backlinks from low-authority domains. These backlinks can harm your website’s authority and diminish the trust search engines place in your website. This will cause your website to lose chances to rank higher and gain visibility.
Backlink Quality Over Volume
Yes, backlinks are great for our authority scores, but what is better is the traffic gained from those healthy backlinks. Google places more importance on quality (traffic received from backlinks) than volume (the number of backlinks). This does not mean that you should receive traffic from all your backlinks to be seen as healthy backlinks, but it sure helps if you do.
SERPs and Keyword Research
It is speculated that Google can limit the number of pages in search results for a given query. This means when you do your keyword research, you should do your SERPs research to see if you can outrank the existing results.
Ranking Factors and Google’s Algorithms
Factors Lowering Content Rankings
We have talked about ranking factors until now, but other factors can cause your website to lose positions. A few of them are:
- Irrelevant links: Using links that are irrelevant to your content will be harmful to your overall domain authority.
- User dissatisfaction: Many unsuccessful links (users that visit your pages and spend little to no time) or many impressions but zero to a few clicks will cause your site to be ranked lower for user queries.
- Negative product reviews: Reviews are a user(customer) satisfaction signal. Negative reviews will signal poor user satisfaction and may potentially affect rankings.
- Exact match domains: Domains that match an exact keyword that people are typing into Google might be seen as manipulative and dishonest domains. Not all EMDs are equal. However, they tend to be seen as spam since many people use them solely for ranking purposes.
- Irrelevant local targeting: If a domain targets a local audience but lacks the relevant content for that audience, it will lose rankings. Since Google aims to offer the most relevant results, irrelevant local targeting goes against its primary goal.
Page Copies and Comparisons
Google can tell the difference between page updates. It can store up to the latest 20 versions of the page to compare and see what changed and how often.
Google Leaks Impact on SEO Strategies
SEO is an area that changes and evolves constantly. This leak demonstrated that we have to continuously learn and adjust our strategies accordingly.
While it is true that we already knew about some of these strategies and some we just discovered now, we recommend brushing up on your content, UX, internal linking, and backlink strategies.
See How We Can Help
If you’re in need of SEO services and consultancy, please get in touch and let’s improve your online presence!
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