TECH NEWS – Some 2500 (!) technical documents have been leaked revealing how Google’s ranking algorithms work.

If it’s not all a hoax, it’s an unprecedented behind-the-scenes look at how the perhaps all-too-dominant search engine works. It is claimed that Google itself uploaded these documents to GitHub before removing them. In vain, because the Internet has no habit of forgetting things, so the uploaded documents have turned up somewhere else. (And if Google were to make a copyright claim, it would only confirm the authenticity of the documents.)

The documents were shared by Erfan Azimi, an SEO consultant at EA Eagle Digital, with Rand Fishkin, a veteran SEO specialist. Azimi says he shared the documents in the hope that they would expose the “lies” Google has been telling about its search platform. The documentation has a highly technical tone, touching on many systems and topics, but roughly summarizing the nature and character of the data Google collects and uses, and how the search engine elevates sensitive topics (like elections) and hides the smaller pages.

In 2016, Paul Haahr, an engineer at Google’s search engine, said it would be a mistake to use clicks directly in ranking, while the documents say it uses a system called NavBoost, which incorporates multiple click-counting metrics into the ranking of pages and search results. Contradictions to Google’s claims have also emerged on several topics, including domain authority, additional data collected when sandboxing new sites, and data collected from the Chrome browser.

If the allegations are true, it will be hard for Google to chalk this up to a desire to protect its search IP from competitors. The documents do not say anything about how pages are ranked, so it is not possible to optimize your site in a big way to rank well in Google search.

Whatever happens, Google is at least facing a major scandal. So how can you trust them?

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