Is Google’s Algorithm Leak an SEO Treasure?
June 12, 2024 2024-06-12 7:00
Is Google’s Algorithm Leak an SEO Treasure?
The Gist
- Validation confirmed. The leak confirms long-suspected SEO strategies.
- Enhanced testing methods. New data will likely drive refined SEO testing techniques.
- Actionable insights revealed. Key SEO tactics for sustained growth detailed.
As a professional search engine optimizer (SEO) for the last 10 years, reverse engineering the nebulous google algorithm has consumed a lot of my time and energy.
So when the news hit that the algorithm was accidentally made public via internal API documentation on GitHub, I was certainly paying attention. The documentation, which includes over 2,500 pages and over 14,000 lines of code detailing Google’s search ranking mechanisms, was publicly accessible from March 27 to May 7, 2024.
During this period, the data was indexed by third-party services, making it available even after Google removed it from GitHub. So the most guarded and prized algorithm in our history has been leaked to the public. Is it changing everything about how SEOs are operating? Surprisingly not. Let’s take a closer look at the Google algorithm leak and 10 search engine optimization insights.
The Google Algorithm Leak: Testers Validate Practices
As Ted Kubaitis, founder and CEO of SEO Tool Lab asserted, “The leak mostly confirmed a lot of things SEO testers have already known for years. Kudos to the SEO testing groups who used scientific methods to get this information years ahead of the leak. Largely, this leak will give those testing groups more ideas on what and how to test. For example, the leak suggests that triggering a peak of spammy anchors over a period of time can result in a penalty. Testers can test methods that avoid different-sized peaks over different time frames to figure out best practices.”
Google Algorithm Leak Reveals Debated SEO Theories
While many theories from the more than 14,000 lines of code have been tested in masterminds and testing groups, an issue with this Google algorithm leak is that we still don’t know which factors are more significant than others. Many theories that SEOs have confirmed through testing, which Google publicly denounced, appear in these lines of code.
As the dust begins to settle, many website owners are left with more questions than answers. Where do we go from here? What is actionable? Below, we break down 10 actionable insights from the Google algorithm leak and steps to help your brand continue to grow online in 2024 and beyond.
Boost Brand Visibility With These 10 Strategic SEO Steps
1. Become a Bigger Brand
OK, let’s address the basics first. Google has stated that impressions for the entire website are part of the Quality NSR data. Some obvious ways to grow sitewide impressions would be to start running another source of traffic to your site like Facebook, Reddit, Bing, or Google Ads, or building a more robust content strategy.
Pro Tip: Instead of building your pay-per-click landing pages on a subdomain that is not indexed, it’s best to incorporate that into your website if at all possible to capitalize on this factor.
Related Article: Master Your B2B Content Strategy Like a Pro
2. Audit Your Navigation
Make sure to have a user-centric design making it easy for users to find what they are looking for. Include links to your most important pages in the top navigation. This ensures that these pages receive sufficient internal link equity and are easily discovered by search engines.
Pro Tip: Put the most important categories in the primary navigation and other target pages in the secondary nav. This helps distribute link equity throughout your site helping to boost the authority of deeper pages. Double-check how this looks on mobile vs. desktop.
Related Article: Not Your Parents’ Mobile UX Design Strategy
3. Add a Table of Contents to Blog Posts
Click-through rate, dwell time, and engagement signals on a page make a real impact. Adding a table of contents can help with UX elements like ease of navigation, enhanced readability, engagement (dwell time), and getting your pages featured as rich snippet results.
Pro Tip: If the TOC length is getting out of control, make it an expandable drop-down. This should also help with engagement signals.
Related Article: UI vs. UX Design: What’s the Difference?
4. Add Authorship to All Blog Posts
Google is looking to reward real websites with real humans behind them. An easy way to help your website here is by associating each blog post with a real author or person at the company. Each post should have a brief author bio at the bottom that includes credentials, social profiles and a link to its author bio section.
An author bio should have more in-depth information, including any awards, leadership signals and all of their posts. For higher stakes content, you will want to add a “reviewed by” section with someone who is an authority in the subject matter. It is important to feature this at the bottom of the post in an author box format as well as in the schema code with article schema featuring the corresponding author and “reviewed by” information.
Pro Tip: Create a Google local guide profile for your authors that is active. Some will go so far as to publish an e-book on Amazon.
Related Article: The Google SEO Leak That Could Change Your Marketing Strategy
5. Update the Publishing Date of Content
Google has a freshness algorithm that prioritizes fresh content for certain search queries, particularly those that are time-sensitive or related to current events. This means that newer content can rank higher for queries where recent information is deemed more relevant. Users tend to prefer and engage more with up-to-date content, which then leads to higher click-through rates (CTR) and better user engagement metrics, which are positive signals for search engines.
Pro Tip: When updating your content, make some edits as high on the page as possible even if just rewriting the first paragraph.
Related Article: Customer Experience Metrics: 3 Steps That Drive Growth
6. Leverage Digital PR
Utilizing digital Press Releases is not just a brand-building play. Both brand mentions and high-quality links from credible sources to your website equate to a higher impression count along with direct visibility on Google news sites.
Pro Tip: Put your most important links the highest in the press release as google (and users) give these more weight
7. Touch Every Link With a Link
Tiered link building is an advanced SEO strategy designed to improve the authority and ranking of a website by creating multiple layers (tiers) of backlinks. Tiered link building often results in internal pages getting linked to more frequently. This can help Google’s crawlers discover and index more pages on your site, improving overall site visibility along with more votes to a specific page.
Pro Tip: Use high quality guest post links as your first tier of links to your money pages. From there you can get creative with less costly and time intensive links to touch those. Keep all of the anchor text (hyperlinks) relevant to the topic you want to rank for.
8. Add Interactive Content
There are several ways of increasing engagement rates with interactive content:
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Interactive Content like quizzes, calculators, poles and surveys are fun and engaging.
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Multimedia Content like videos, infographics and podcasts keep users on the page longer, are more engaging than plain text and can be shared easily.
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User Generated Content like comments on posts or reviews for an ecommerce product helps keep pages fresh and show both engagement and trust (though requires consistent monitoring).
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Social Share Buttons to your content to make it easy for users to share with their networks.
Pro Tip: Add a video at the top of your most important content pages to summarize the content. This will not only help conversion rates but keep the user on the page significantly longer
Related Article: One Marketing Leader’s Path Forward in the Digital Era
9. Increase Branded Search
Google also seems to be correlating the amount of branded searches to the number of links it is giving credit to for any given site. So increasing the volume of searches for your brand name can both increase your impression count and maximize your link profile. Outside of the suggestions given to increase impression count, maintaining a consistent and active presence on major social media platforms is a great way to do this. Share engaging content, interact with followers and use branded hashtags. Also offline events like hosting events, sponsorships and partnerships all help accomplish this goal.
Pro Tip: For your link in bio for social profiles, link to the Google search result for your brand’s name where you are ranking No. 1 with prominent presence across the page.
10. Build Your Topical Map — With Consistency
Websites that thoroughly cover a particular topic are considered authoritative. This means providing in-depth articles, guides, FAQs and various types of content that cover all aspects of a topic. These should have relevant author credentials, citations and references with a good internal linking structure that direct to your money pages.
For years, I have seen an uptick in results with clients who publish content regularly given any frequency (as little as one-to-two blogs per month). There does seem to be a frequency cap as SEOs really tried to push the limits publishing as many as 1,000 new posts per day with the AI revolution and some clever coding until the May 6 smackdown. A safe bet is to see what your competitors are doing and slightly outpace them.
Pro Tip: Batch your topical content together and submit the URLs in search console together. This appears to give a quick relevancy boost.
Final Thoughts
The recent Google’s algorithm leak documentation confirms many known SEO strategies while highlighting new areas for improvement. Business owners should focus on building brand presence, optimizing site navigation, updating content regularly, leveraging digital PR and increasing engagement through interactive content and tiered link building.
By implementing these actionable insights, you can enhance your website’s SEO, improve search rankings, and drive sustainable growth in 2024 and beyond.
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