The Google Leak

The man above is Rand Fishkin, the co-founder of sparktoro.com and snackbarstudio.com, and an SEO expert who’s been battling Google for some time.

Battling over what?

Over what Google’s algorithm tracks, and how it decides what ranks.

While at Moz, which Fishkin co-founded, he developed the concept of domain authority, a metric that predicts a website's ability to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs). Google denied using any such metric, but domain authority became widely adopted by the SEO community.

Next, Fishkin conducted various experiments, the results of which suggested that Google uses click-through rates (CTR) and user engagement as ranking factors. Once again, Google denied the “allegation”.

Lastly, Fishkin suspected the existence of a Google “sandbox” effect where new websites are temporarily prevented from ranking well in search results. Guess what Google said?

Here are some of the statements from Google representatives over the years denying Fishkin’s theories and even calling his takes “made-up crap”.

On May 5th, Fishkin received an email from a person claiming to have access to a massive leak of API documentation from Google Search division. Authenticity was verified with the help of ex-Google employees.

Turns out… Fishkin was right about the CTR and the sandbox. And while Google doesn’t use Moz’s exact domain authority metric, it has a similar one.

Mike King, a renowned technical SEO and founder of iPullRank, picked the documentation apart and broke it down in an in-depth blog post if you want a closer look.

Briefly:

There is no detail about Google’s scoring functions in the documentation.

There is a wealth of information about data and features manipulated and stored by Google to run its search engine.

The man who leaked the documentation later came forward with a statement.

Takeaway: Google has apparently been less than truthful for years. And while we can empathize with them protecting proprietary information, their efforts to discredit people like Fishkin are condemnable.

Both this leak and information revealed during Google’s DOJ trial have shown that Google consistently attempts to veil the truth, which makes it hard to trust its future statements.