Google’s algorithm leak tells us nothing and everything

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If you’re not knee deep in the world of SEO then there’s a good chance you didn’t hear about the Google documentation leak. That happened in May of 2024 and Google confirmed that it was real. They did say that the information is incomplete and out of date, nevertheless it gives us some very strong insights as to what Google’s algorithm finds important when ranking websites.

What does the leak tell us?

The leak tells us that Google has evolved to use a number of ways to determine which sites are of a higher quality and which sites should rank higher in its search results. Some of the useful parts of the leak tell us the following:

• Google likely uses user data to determine whether or not a site is satisfying demand and providing a good experience. If the site is judged to be useful to users and of a high quality it will be rewarded with higher rankings and more traffic.
• High quality content that is focused strongly around a single subject will be rewarded with higher rankings.
• A site that produces high quality content on a regular basis around a similar subject will be rewarded.
• The effort that has gone into content can be measured, and is.
• Topical authority can help a site’s rankings.

Notice how many times I’ve mentioned high quality content? That’s because it’s important. Google has been talking about content quality a lot for the last few years. Google has said many times to just build a great site and it will do well in search. To most SEO consultants including ourselves at Big Surf Digital  this has seemed like somewhat simplistic advice but the leak shows that Google have been building out their technology with the aim of identifying and then rewarding high quality content.

Effort is an interesting element that has also been talked about since the leak. The effort that you put into creating a page can be judged by Google and articles with high effort baked in should do well in search. With effort think images, tables and charts, graphics, video, interviews, well sourced reference links and anything else you would expect to see in a professional document.

How can SEOs and website owner’s action this?

The bad news is that there are no quick fixes to getting lots of traffic from Google. That’s been true for a while now but in the past it was possible to do good SEO for clients by optimising the content they already had with a focus on improving keyword targeting in metadata and content as well as link building. While those things are still important it is now crucial to ensure that a website has no bad content on it and that the remaining content is of a very high quality. Certainly higher than the competition. It looks like low quality content will either hurt your site’s authority and therefore its rankings or not be indexed at all.

The good news on this front is that SEO is now within reach of most businesses, with or without an SEO provider. If website owners concentrate their efforts on producing consistent, well researched, insightful and thorough content it should be possible to pull in some substantial content from Google. That in itself is no mean feat however.

Topical authority is something that came up in the leak. Having a site that is acknowledged by Google to have authority on a subject will make it much easier to rank highly for specific keywords. By answering all the questions around a subject with your content it is possible to serve the user’s needs and gain topical authority. Again, consistent high quality content is key. On a related note Google rewards sites that focus in on one specific subject or a small number of related subjects rather than post content about a thousand different unrelated subjects.

Another way to increase your authority is of course links from reputable sites. So in that respect there’s no change, although the quality of those links is more important than ever.

Were there any surprising things in the leak?

The first surprising aspect was user data. For years Google had been telling the world that user data wasn’t included in its algorithms but the leak points to evidence that how well a website performs for users is taken into account. If users come from a Google search to a website and that site shows good engagement metrics then the algorithm will reward that site with higher rankings. Going the other way, if a site achieves high rankings but the user engagement isn’t up to scratch the algorithm will in time demote the site. This points to the fact that conversion rate optimisation could be an important part of an SEO campaign alongside a robust content plan.

One very surprising element is that the font size and weight of text elements comes up as a factor. It makes sense really when you look at the effect of differing text elements on the way users interact with content. Text size and weight variances can make a page much easier to read and make the elements on a page stand out.

Bigger lessons learned from the leak

I’m a big fan of learning lessons that are universal rather than subject specific. I think the lesson from this is to remember that a corporation has its own interests at heart, which is fairly obvious. But another important lesson I think is that fixating on individual things Google says is probably not a good strategy. Some of their advice to website owners is relevant and some is not.  By running rankings tests with different SEO strategies it should be possible to come to our own conclusions as to what does or doesn’t push the needle rankings wise. It’s also important to consider the experience that your customers have on your site. Spend time on working out what they want to see and work on delivering that, whether that means improving your page speed, your copy, your checkout process or any of the other tasks that may need attention.