Last week, a document with invaluable details explaining how the Google Algorithm works leaked, giving society a look at invaluable information. This Google algorithm document leak will be one of the biggest stories in the history of Google Search and SEO! The last time something this big happened was last year, when we got an unprecedented look at Yandex Search ranking factors which ended up being one of the biggest stories last year.
So, what’s inside? Here are 7 important things to know about the internal Google algorithm document leak, thanks to Rand Fishkin, SparkToro co-founder, and Michael King, iPullRank CEO:
1. It’s Current: The documentation indicates this information is accurate as of March 2024 (Note: The Google March 2024 Core Update has affected a lot of websites negatively)
2. Ranking Features: 2,596 modules are represented in the API documentation with 14,014 ranking attributes (Note: API stands for Application Programming Interface. APIs are a fundamental component of web-based applications that allow two software components to communicate with each other)
3. Weighting of the Google Ranking Factors: The documents did not specify how any of the ranking features are weighted – just that they exist)
4. Reasons Why Content Can Be Demoted: Content can be demoted for a variety of reasons, such as:
– A link doesn’t match the target site
– Search engine signals indicating user dissatisfaction from a bad UX experience
– Bad product reviews
– Porn
– Exact match domains
5. Font Size Matters: Google measures the average weighted font size of terms in documents (avgTermWeight) and anchor text.
6. Change History: Apparently, Google keeps a copy of every version of every page it has ever indexed on a website. In other words, Google can remember every change ever made to a web page. However, it is important to note that Google only uses the last 20 changes of a URL when analyzing links.
7. Page Titles Still Matter: Google has a feature called titlematchScore that is believed to measure how well a page title matches a query — the title of your page should match the content.
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