Insights from Google’s Leaked Search Documents and What They Mean for SEO

Detailed is for people who are past the SEO basics (or at least looking to level-up quickly).

I've been writing about SEO since I was 15 years old, and a decade later I'm fortunate to have consulted for companies I love like Ahrefs, Kinsta, Buffer, ConvertKit and multi-billion dollar brands.

The basics can be incredibly effective, but hundreds of sites cover them well and I want to focus on unique, creative ways to achieve better rankings.

Instead, here's my promise: I will put my absolute all into guides like this one to give original insights that help you get an edge over your competition.

That's it. That's my pitch for you to stick around (or perhaps let you know this isn't the site for you).

This is already too much text for a 'click-to-read-more-fade-thing' but there's more if you like.

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As of the last few hours it has came to light that various internal Google documents, which appear to be legitimate, have surfaced.

The “leak” is still live, which I will not link directly to, and came to light via someone who wanted to remain anonymous sharing the data with Sparktoro founder, Rand Fishkin.

I’ve spent the last hour going through the documents trying to find anything interesting, so thought I would share some insights here.

My perspective is that these are fun and interesting to look at from an SEO perspective, but I wouldn’t be using these to dictate the strategy of your business.

If anything, it’s nice to seemingly get confirmation of a number of ideas which SEOs have been preaching for years.

isNonLocationSpecific

createdDate and expiredDate

isNofollow

I was specifically interested in the commentary that “if the page has multiple links to the same URL, all of them must be nofollow to set this field.”

title

This is in reference to Shopping, rather than Google as a whole.

phraseAnchorSpamCount

Honestly, I think all of these are pretty interesting.

QualityTravelGoodSitesData

I’m yet to notice any other categories besides Travel being referenced in this way.

topicalityScore

It’s always interesting to see specific sites mentioned, such as AppleInsider in this case.

onSiteProminence

mediaOrPeopleEntities

Credit to Mike King at iPullRank who has some great commentary on this and was instrumental in surfacing the data.