Backstory
- Thousands of documents from Google’s internal content API were released on Github on March 13 by an automated bot.
- These documents have been shared on SparkToro’s blog.
- Google confirmed that the docs are real.
Here’s what the documents claim affects your search ranking:
Brand
- Rand Fishkin summarized this factor as brands should “build a notable, popular, well-recognized brand in your space, outside of Google search.”
- This can be done via social media, Reddit, etc.
Incoming Links
- Link relevance, PageRank and from a variety of sites
- An old resource created in 2019 – https://www.drivetraffic.ca/blog/getting-website-links/
Click Through Rate
- Google is more likely to surface content that people are more likely to click on
- If you have pages with few clicks, it’s time to rework those pages to get people visiting
- You can find the CTR for each page in Google Search Console.
Authorship
- Google uses the author of a specific piece of content to help them determine the trustworthiness and credibility of the content (E-E-A-T)
- Related blog posts:
Content Freshness
- In addition to publishing new content regularly, it is important to refresh older content (and update the date on the page when doing so)
- Again, an older resource but the concept is still the same! https://www.drivetraffic.ca/blog/is-your-site-suffering-from-thin-content/
Page Titles
- Google’s module ‘titlematchScore’ suggests they measure how well a page title matches a search query.
- Cheat sheet for titles and other on-page optimization practices at https://www.drivetraffic.ca/blog/on-page-optimization-cheat-sheet/
Reasons for Poor Visibility in Google
- Poor domain authority or PageRank or the incoming links are not relevant to the site (think mail order bride links which were incredibly popular as a link building tool once upon a time)
- Poor CTR – your website shows up in Google but people don’t tend to click on it (hint fixing your title and description might help)
- Weak E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) – Google does not know who wrote the content and/or the visibility of that person beyond the website is poor
These leaked factors, on the whole, are not new and many are expanded upon in the Generative Search Experience posts.
- About the Author
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Darlene is a search marketer, analyst, speaker, trainer, and owner of DriveTraffic Digital Marketing. She has been working in the digital marketing industry since the mid 90s and has narrowed her specialty to SEO, Google Ads and Google Analytics. She is especially interested in Google’s new Search Generative Experience and how businesses will need to adapt to remain visible. Want to see how DriveTraffic can help? Let’s chat!
