Google's Leak Has Shaken up the Industry
Recently a massive leak of Google's algorithm has been making the rounds among the SEO community. While it has some decent information in there, for anyone who has been doing SEO for more than a few months, the findings shouldn't be all that surprising. However, the doc, if considered to be truly accurate also shows that we as professionals operating in SEO can't always take Google's word as truth.
The Least Shocking
Engagement is Important
Engagement metrics have surfaced in the document and they look to be a factor in how google determines ranking. It should be noted that the leak does not go into depth regarding how each of these different factors ends up being scored - just that these are factors. Anyone who has been operating in the organic space can tell you that more engagement leads to better ranking and the leak essentially adds ammo to that cannon. Previously there was no hard data to support this claim but now with the leak, there is a bloody fingerprint that essentially confirms that engagement metrics do in fact play a role in page ranking.
Brand Matters
The other finding that shouldn't surprise anyone in the SEO space is that your brand does the heavy lifting. The linked article sums up a quote from Rand Fishkin pretty nicely "If there was one universal piece of advice I had for marketers seeking to broadly improve their organic search rankings and traffic, it would be: ‘Build a notable, popular, well-recognized brand in your space, outside of Google search." Based on the findings, this confirms that smaller brands and smaller websites that have less of a presence offline are going to struggle to rank well, especially for shorter tail terms that don't have local search results. Again, this is not surprising as West Loop SEO has both national and local clients and we can confirm that smaller brands do have a harder time ranking when compared to brands that have a stronger local or national presence.
Site Updates matter
At previous agencies I worked at, the idea that recency updates would benefit a site was often scoffed at and was treated as a "tin foil hat" type approach but this document proves that significant updates to a page will in fact help that page with rankings. The leak shows that google will keep a change record for up to 20 recent changes to a site, the more significant the more likely that page is to get a recency bonus to its page ranking. Updates to content or design look to be a factor but again, its hard to say exactly how much weight that factor has. Take this one with a grain of salt though as the data can have several interpretations.
The Most Shocking
Links Still Have Value
Many in the SEO community have essentially turned their backs on link building, link cleanup, or otherwise focusing on external links. I know many of the brands I have worked on seemed to exclusively focus on internal link building, which is important, but turn their nose up at the idea of looking through their back link portfolio and cleaning up unrelated links or links that don't align with the page type. If a link is found to not match the target site, that could result in a demotion according to the Google leak doc. Link diversity, link quality, and link relevance still look to be a factor and SEOs should consider reengaging with basic link building tactics. This doesn't mean start sending out spam emails to get guest posts or look for sidebar links to buy but rather make sure you have quality links that point to a page that is relevant to the anchor text or linking site.
Page Titles are Still Important
This might be odd to see under the most shocking category given how crucial this is to basic on page SEO but page titles are still relevant. Why is this here? Well just a few months ago it looked like Google was turning its back on page titles. This seemed to be the case once the favicon update rolled out and was live for all users. Google started writing their own page titles for URLs or otherwise forgoing displaying that information in favor of set favicons. It looked like this on page element was about to go the way of the keyword tag but it turns out, this is not the case and page titles still matter. As the leak confirms, Google uses 'titlematchScore' to measure how well a page title matches a query. If your SEO told you page titles aren't important anymore, it might be time to look for a new agency.
Google Lies
This also might be weird to see under the most shocking section but many SEO professionals, myself included, can sometimes take Google and their public facing spokespeople at facevalue. People in the spotlight, such as Matt Cutts in the past and John Mueller in the present, have given out public information that seems to be largely invalidated by this leak. This includes things like pagerank not being a thing, which the leak shows it is, engagement metrics not factoring into overall ranking, which the leak shows it does, and a slew of other examples that simply contradict what has been publicly stated by Google. This is just more proof that following the evidence at hand is better than believing the "experts" from the company that doesn't want their secrets to be publicly known. Best advice to take to heart here is just be sure to trust the results of your efforts and not the talking heads telling you what you're doing isn't or won't work.
