In May of 2024, a massive internal Google document leaked and it was the talk of the town for the SEO community. Of course, even for most SEOs who like to think they are technically savvy, it’s a hard for most to digest and understand, much less confirm whether they ultimately matter in Google’s algo.
Thankfully almost all well respected SEOs, media and news websites covered the story in depth, and provided some great summaries and analyses of the data. Here are some of the best that I found, including at the top of the list the article by Rand Fishkin, who was first contacted by the anonymous source who was later publicly confirmed to be Erfan Azimi.
- An Anonymous Source Shared Thousands of Leaked Google Search API Documents with Me; Everyone in SEO Should See Them – Sparktoro.com
- 22 Things We Might Have Learned From The Google Search Leak – Searchlogistics.com
- Secrets from the Algorithm: Google Search’s Internal Engineering Documentation Has Leaked – Ipullrank.com
- This is The Biggest Google Search Algorithm Leak in History. Here’s What it Means for Bloggers – Sheknowsseo.co
These articles contain plenty to provide SEOs and marketers with valuable insights into Google’s leak and what it potentially means for their ranking algorithm, what I care about as a link builder is what it means for backlinks and how they affect websites rankings. There are some great tidbits in those articles above, but there was not enough data and insights into links to satisfy my never-ending appetite for link data.
The only to truly know what I want to know if to read the entire document myself. So i did…just kidding.
But thankfully, it’s 2024 and I have CHATGPT to help me out. So I fed it the entire document – more than 14,000 protocols. And here’s what it gave me:
The data
I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of catching up to do when it comes to ChatGPT prompts. I know there is a ton of good content and advice on the Web about using prompts to maximize GPT’s output, but I have simply not gotten around to it. So my request to ChatGPT was simple: Read the document and explain to me like I was a dummy.
The result was a little underwhelming at first. It was a 4-point summary, with accompanying notes for each. Those 4 points were:
- API Endpoints and Connections
- Metadata and Attributes
- Anchors and Links (bingo!)
- Verdict Restrictions and Abuse Content Handling
I’m sure I did not prompt it” well enough to understand, categorize and cross examine the entire document from an SEO and link building perspective, but the “Anchors and Links” point caught my attention.
I then asked it to elaborate on Anchors and Links. Here’s what I got:
Anchors and Links Breakdown
Too many links on one page can dilute the weight passed to each linked page.
Anchor Definition:
Importance for SEO:
- Anchors in the document refer to links connecting one web page to another, often with descriptive text that users can click on.
- Example: The underlined, clickable text in “Click here to learn more” is the anchor text.
Anchor text helps search engines understand what the linked page is about.
Relevance of the anchor text to the linked page boosts rankings in search engine results.
Anchor Quality:
Importance for SEO:
- The document categorizes anchors based on source page quality:
- High-Quality Anchors: Come from authoritative pages with strong content and are considered the most valuable.
- Medium-Quality Anchors: From decently authoritative pages but not as powerful as high-quality sources.
- Low-Quality Anchors: Typically from less trusted or poorly ranked sites.
High-quality anchors are weighted more heavily in search engine algorithms, contributing to a higher ranking.
Low-quality anchors can sometimes negatively impact SEO, especially if they’re from spammy or irrelevant websites.
Anchor Text and Context:
Importance for SEO:
- The document discusses the original text (anchor text) and nearby terms (context) around the anchor link.
- Context Hashing: A process that creates a hash or a representation of nearby words to understand the broader context of the anchor.
Anchor text should be descriptive and contextual to accurately reflect the content of the linked page.
Proper context around the anchor boosts the relevance of both the source and target pages for search engines.
Anchor Fragment:
Importance for SEO:
- The fragment refers to a specific section of a page linked by the anchor (e.g.,
www.example.com#section).- Helps users jump to a particular part of the target page.
Improves user experience by directing them to relevant sections of content.
Can improve dwell time (the time users stay on the page), which indirectly benefits SEO.
Anchor Dropping:
Importance for SEO:
- The document mentions the process of dropping redundant or supplemental anchors to avoid overcrowding and duplication in link data.
- This ensures only unique, relevant links are preserved.
Avoids link dilution by focusing on a few high-quality links rather than many low-value ones.
Keeps crawl budgets efficient, ensuring search engines focus on important links.
Anchor Forwarding:
Importance for SEO:
- Anchors are sometimes forwarded or redirected to another target URL. This process is important for handling canonical URLs (the preferred version of a page).
Proper handling of anchor forwarding prevents duplicate content issues.
Ensures link equity (SEO value of links) is passed to the correct, canonical version of a page.
Anchor Locality:
Importance for SEO:
- Refers to whether the source and target pages of an anchor link are on the same domain or different domains.
- On-site or On-domain Links: Anchors linking to pages within the same domain.
- Off-site Links: Anchors linking to pages on different domains.
On-site links help search engines understand the structure of your website, improving the crawlability of your internal pages.
Off-site links (backlinks) from authoritative, relevant websites are one of the most critical factors in ranking well.
Anchor Source Type:
Importance for SEO:
- The document defines source types for anchors:
- Type-High Quality: From base, authoritative documents.
- Type-Medium Quality: From medium-quality or supplemental documents.
- Type-Low Quality: From less authoritative or lower-tier documents.
High-quality sources increase trustworthiness and authority of your page.
Linking to low-quality or irrelevant sites can negatively affect your SEO, as it lowers the overall trustworthiness of your site.
Anchor Text Weighting for PageRank:
Importance for SEO:
- PageRank Weighting is an SEO concept where the weight or importance of an anchor is determined, affecting how much value it passes to the linked page.
- Anchors have different weights based on their source page quality and the number of other links on that page.
High PageRank-weighted anchors pass more SEO value to the linked page, helping it rank better in search results.
It is important to note that the document is hypothetical in nature, and in no way confirms how Google uses these protocols. But my opinion can be summarized as follows:
What it means and should you care?
Yes and no. You might want to read Google’s response to the leak first.
What it means is that Google clearly focuses on these factors – but nobody can say for sure to what extent.
So the bottom line is, as a website owner you priorities should be building a solid, well designed and fast-loading website, create good quality content that earns links and prioritize your users first. Not Google.
