Synup Office Hour #10 - 28th May 2024 | Insights from the Recent Google Leak: Key Takeaways for SEO

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All right, we're good to go. Great, good morning, everyone. Thank you everyone for joining.

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This is Office Hour episode number 10. So, I’ll get right into it. As my colleague Akshita was covering it, there was this interesting article that went live yesterday.

There are a couple of articles, related articles. There were two posts that highlighted this first. There was one article, the original mega article that went live was from Michael King.

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Don't have to note down anything. We will be sending over the notes like always with links to every article, tools, opinions that we talk about and discuss during these sessions. So, the first article was from Michael King, who actually painstakingly went through this documentation accouple of weeks ago.

The documentation relates to engineering documentation from Google that apparently was leaked by one of their employees. Some SEOs are claiming the information to be groundbreaking. Some SEOs are too excited to draw any meaningful conclusion at the moment because they're too emotional about the documentation.

And for some like me, it's mostly old information that we were already aware of, despite the fact that Google has been publicly denying a lot of things that are covered. So, this purported engineering documentation was studied by both Rand, who was initially part moms, but since then he's moved on. And I believe his non-compete is also over with Moz due to which he can talk about things related to search.

So, Rand is currently associated with a new platform that gives you a lot of insights, especially useful for B2Bbusinesses. So, they covered this in detail. The entire documentation that was leaked was about 2,500 pages, I believe, that had internal core information related to their API and engineering backgrounds, etc.

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And some code. So, I basically read through most of this content when it was initially released, purportedly leaked. I don’t know which one is true.

There's no way for me to find out. But based on this documentation, a few things that we should highlight. Apparently, the documentation has covered several elements that we were already aware of.

As we all know, there were like 200 plus search ranking factors. These are the major ones. But as per Google's own internal documentation, there are like 14,000 plus search ranking factors that are applied at different phases of the customer journey.

So, the primary thing that came off it is site authority. This leaked documentation does mention site authority indicating its role in ranking and contradicting Google's own public denial of domain authority usage. By the way, domain authority does not relate or has anything to do with the third party's codes that you see on platforms like Moz or Arefs or Majestic.

It's their own algorithm. There are no way fours, you and me, to know how it is measured or computed. But the fact is, as per Google’s own algo and related documentation, it does exist.

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Google has been immediately denied in the past that they use any form of user behaviour data, like click-through information to influence rankings, which again highlights the influence click-through rate has and user interaction has on ranking signals. I'm not sure if many of you have used something like Mechanical Turks in the past to influence click-through rates or done experimentations with it, but we have. We have seen its usefulness in driving ranking, but you can draw your own conclusion from it if you run your own tests, experiments.

If you're interested to learn more about it, we can discuss it later as to what and how you can apply it in your offering or your day-to-day work. Google doesn't need analytics for click-through data because click behaviour, user behaviour, is the easiest way of understanding whether something is useful. This again influences helpful content algos because if content is not helpful, you're not basically going to click on it.

If you click on it, you're going to quit out of the page. So that drives on the fact why content needs to be useful. Content needs to answer users' query right at the beginning rather than those long-drawn introductions that some people end up writing.

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The leaked information also mentioned sandbox effect. This is something that SEO world was aware of a while ago. So, if you have a new website that is not trusted well or an untrusted website, it does affect its visibility.

A lot of people, even we have faced it where like site is live for three months, I've done everything necessary, does not show up in search results permanently. Visibility is diminished. Even if it's a new niche, it used to be difficult.

It still is. Apparently, it's part of Google's algorithm. They replace the content or a website in a sandbox.

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This is again, not definite, but documentation does suggest the age of the domain and the website that plays an effect, a prominent role in it. Chrome browser data, again, documentation shows that site-level Chrome views. This may suggest some Chrome users' data play a parting real-time signal.

That can explain why the growth of Chrome and why Google pushed Chrome to this extent. Again, there are some contradictions in the documentation because what Google said and what Google write is two different things. As I always keep saying, take Google's advice with a pinch of salt.

Don't do what Google says, study them and do based on how Google behaves. What should be the key takeaways from these 2,500pieces of documents that have been leaked? There are like 500 to 1,000 blogs that are going to go live about it over the course of the next few weeks. Thesis going to blow up.

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Links will remain important. The core metrics, the core practices of SEO will remain true. Links are important.

The source type indicates how well Google understands a website and how well it trusts. There's no other way. If you ‘restarting a new website for a customer, how do you implement this? Do a content, make sure you cover the cluster well.

Maybe it will require you to come up with plans for sites that are different from what you used to do. I know most agencies; the way agencies implement content on a website if they do not have the website business in place is basically, I'll do a couple of articles a month. If it's a new business and you're building a brand-new website, this is not going to cut it.

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I would say charge upfront for the content. Do whatever is necessary to cover the topic from all different angles. For that, you cannot wait for a 12-month contract from a customer and then plan on doing one or two articles a month.

You have to do it upfront. Do not try to rank a page on its own. Cover it authoritatively, cover it from all angles, cover it through all the keywords that customer is supposed to use.

Charge upfront for the content, plan it out accordingly, and then provide that plan to the customer. Buildings from the very beginning. As soon as your dark content is done, start building links.

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A handful of good links will do well at local search. You do not need to compete with the national providers. This is one of the reasons why more successful SEOs, they do link building at scale at the beginning.

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Content. Google evaluates the originality of short content and emphasizes the need to place the content early. That was one of my understandings from the documentation.

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Again, information prioritization. That's the reason why tools like also asked that we covered in the past can be so helpful in understanding information priority based on the questions customers are asking. So, cover the information that customers are asking first, then go after the rest of the details that you want to cover based on a topic.

There is easier way of finding out how competitors are ranking for a certain keyword, how some of the content is ranking well. For example, I'll just go through this. Akshita, can you see my Google browser? Yep.

Perfectly. Okay. So, for example, I search for car insurance, right? Let's see what are the typical insurance sites that are ranking.

Allstate, Liberty Mutual, Geico, Progressive.com, III, Farmers Insurance. Say they show up in local search or you're doing a national campaign for a larger provider. This is how I go about it.

I try and find out what is helping All state rank this page because this page, if I go to this page, it's just an insurance code page. It does not have a ton of content. Most of the content that you see over here are Q&As, they are the links to other content.

But can I use Google? Can I just use Google without any expensive SEO tool to find out how this piece of content or this piece of page is ranking without looking at link building or other aspects? Just your content check. So, what I do is open this in a new window. I do aside search.

I want to search for car insurance pages onallstate.com. So, remember I was telling you that just one page alone does not make you rank well. Look at the number of pages Allstate has related to car insurance and related terms on the website. This is like they probably created hundreds of related pages related to resources and stuff related to this.

Unfortunately, Google has taken away the results count, the number of results that show up for a given term, but you can get the gist. What you can do from here is a plugin called SEO Minion. You can use this Chrome plugin for free.

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Install it. Copy the first two or three pages of your competitor website to study them better and get a list of URLs. Then study those URLs to see the type of content and topics they are covering.

They are all related to car insurance. So, this is just not one page that Allstate is allowing it to rank well. These are all the associated pages where they have covered the topics in its entirety to make sure that one page ranks better than most.

So that's what I mean when you're writing content, when you're creating your clusters. That's one of the points. Secondly, authors will play an important role going forward.

Google is storing author information, authorship information. They are also creating profiles for even Google guides. So, this will come into play in the future.

There is a scoring modifier that was noticed that basically what that state is, this is like the typical part of their panned algorithm upgrade where it's based on user behaviour. It's also based on external links applied at various level to a domain or a subdomain or a subdirectory due to which you will notice, even we have noticed some of our subdirectories rank better. Google is creating them more frequently.

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Any piece of content that goes on their ranks better, performs better, gets indexed early. Then there are certain directories or subdomains or subdirectories that are demoted based on user behaviour. The most important piece of argument or content that I saw in this documentation was related to content demotion.

So, content quality can be negatively affected for issues like anchor text mismatch, exact match domains or dissatisfaction. Basically, if it doesn't satisfy the user query or if it's an off-topic content or the domain is for something else and you're publishing content for something else. That is the reason why when you're building links, it's very important to stay semantically true to the topic that you're writing about.

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If you're writing about marketing, try to get links from websites or blogs or content pieces that are related to marketing. If your website is related to insurance, try and get content or sorry, try and get links from pages or websites related to insurance. If you're linking out to somebody, make sure you stay within topic.

For example, if you're linking to a page for a local provider, make sure it's related to the topics that you're writing about or covering in your blog or on the website. As soon as you go off topic, your content piece, that overall content authority can be negatively impacted. Anyway, we will send over the notes along with the articles.

They're very detailed. You can understand more. I'll add some additional links so that you can learn more about the topics that we just chatted about.

So as mentioned, people are upset. Some people, especially SEOs are upset because oh, Google said this in the public statement on user signals, subdomain ranking, etc. They are not true to their words.

I kind of disagree. Google is true to their own earning potential and monetizing their own tools that they are launching. It's us, we have to figure out how it works and make sure it works in our Favor.

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Google is not created to make us money. Google has been created to make them and their investors’ money. So, it's going to be an exciting argument that I am reading through it.

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So, if I come to know about it more, I'll send over more details to everyone who subscribed to this event. Okay. Let's get away from this too serious stuff to some of the tips of the week.

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I came across a recent article. I remember we covered parts of Screaming Frog last week, but there was this brilliant article that I came across last week on Search Engine Land that utilizes Screaming Frog’s new custom GS application and how you can use it in conjunction with also ask API to scrape your own content and basically analyse it at scale. Sayaf, you have five different websites or 10 different websites, or you're working with a large client that has like hundreds and thousands of pages, or doing a content quality audit on your website at scale, or if you're dealing with 200plus clients in different categories, it's difficult.

Give this article a read. I found it really useful. I started using it already.

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I might put together a step-by-step guide going forward someday for different niches and how you can do it. But this information is good enough for you to get started with. If you are using Screaming Frog, if you just get up, you can easily configure it and along with also ask API, which is relatively cheap than most expensive SEO tools and try it out.

I found it really interesting when I was running it myself, so I thought of sharing. Again, the link will be included in the notes that Darshana sends across, so watch out for it. So next thing I was looking at was we were auditing a few customer profiles.

For example, let's look at the theatre district. It's an interesting place that shows up when I started scrolling through the Map Finder and I started scrolling. This is from the owner.

There are updates being added by customers which usually used to show up only under the photo section. They're not getting prominently featured as posts under the main profile on Map Finder. Everything else remains the same.

This was new to me. This was unique to me, Buti don't come across this too often. So, these look like posts.

So, your customers can actually post on a business profile. So, when you're auditing customers, especially if you're in the hotel's niche, people are mis utilizing this information and soliciting other kinds of services. If you are especially in the hotel's industry, I think you should take some time and audit these in a timely manner because especially if there are local guides, as you can see here, they show up fairly prominently on your profile, especially when you're looking at it from the Map Finder ormaps.google.com. Earlier, customers' own posts used to show up in this fashion.

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Now it looks like anyone who's doing business with that particular business are posting on their behalf. This is happening. In my opinion, this is both good and bad.

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Cover the bad first. As I mentioned, if you're hotel business, I've seen strange things popping up here. Third-party organizations are mis utilizing this information and soliciting other kinds of illegal businesses.

But for a new business, it's fairly good because it's kind of improving the visibility on searches. Does it impact ranking? I don't know. Possibly not, but there could be certain secondary behavioural signals that could affect or impact your ranking.

Do they drive conversions? Probably. If the content is good, that is being posted by local guide. So, what should we take away from this? How can I use it? Start an event for local guides.

If it's a new business out there, they want something prominently discussed and they want people to talk about it, people to know about it. Posting your own updates is one way of doing it. But having local guides from that region promote by posting your profiles, tagging you, it kind of has that social media effect.

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You can put up a sign on your business or put-up a sign on a client's business and encourage local guides to share their photos on your My Business profile. Hi, Neil. I think you got... Is it connected? Yeah, I think so.

Where was I? Can you hear me? Yeah, I think there's a slight lag. Can you maybe try joining again? Okay. Hold on a sec.

Hold on a sec. I'll just switch network and join back. Give me a minute.

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Sorry for this, guys. Sure, no worries. Am I audible now? Yep.

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Okay, where did you guys lose me? You were talking about the ranking impacts? Okay. Okay. I got it.

Okay. So, updates from customers, I don't think they have direct ramification on ranking, but there could be some secondary effect based on the behavioural signal as it might increase your speed through rate or probably other effects. Do these updates drive conversion? Yes and no.

Yes, if it's prominently displayed, if it's well done, things fully done, then it may drive some conversions because people will look at it and find out what they can do, what you have to offer. It could help potentially sell or promote a particular product or service. So, what can you do with this update from customers? I can think of basically putting a poster or an event, post an event for local guides prominently displayed at the business and ask them to share their photos like we used to do with social media one-time ages ago when it still worked.

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You can email customers or find out if any of your existing customers are local guides and give them instructions so they can post on your profiles. If you have something that is photo worthy or a new product or a new service or a new item on the menu that you want to be promoted, start a promotion with the local guides in the region and they can post about it. It can have that virality effect and we like doing and seeing things what others and how others interact with the business and take decisions on it.

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So, play on that. Yeah, you can cross promote products and services within the business. So, try it out, give it a shot.

If I get more ideas, we'll create some more content around it and maybe give you a collection of things we find so that you can get some ideas from it. Third tip of the week, avoid keyword difficulty scores. I'm sure that most of you are using some of our SEO tool as we all use.

We use a handful of them, not a lot. Our primary stack is Screaming Frog. Sometimes I would go in and dabble with the content I find on All's Last and SEM Rush.

Ahrefs is something that I used to use. I used to have a personal account but I dropped because of the pricing changes and the usage-based pricing scared me, honestly. Someone I know got an invoice from the usage after a month and I decided to drop it.

But if you are using some kind of this tool from Jeff Jay or SEM Rush or if you're using something like Ahrefs, usually and you're using it to do keyword research, which I truly, truly think that you shouldn't, then you will notice they publish something called a keyword difficulty score. Now that's usually a proprietary metric that is calculated differently by different tools. So be very, very careful when you're using such markers and basic decisions on what content to publish or what content to write based on those metrics.

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There are cases where we have found where SEMrush and Ahrefs and Majestic data vary. A lot. For example, one of the keywords that I was looking at, SM Rush said that is very hard to rank for, but at the same time, Ahrefs mentions it's easy. So, I don't know what to read from it. So, my favourite keyword tool still remains the three I use every day, almost every day when I write content. Goal Ad Planner. They are messing around with keyword scores a lot. They are messing around with clunking different types of keywords together. But that remains my go-to place when I start up something new.

Secondary tool is my own Search Console information. When I have enough data, if you do not have it, then just rely on Google and search for things and see what shows up. Third thing that I mine a lot is customer information. We record all our calls, CS and sales calls. I use that a lot. I basically run chat GPT prompts on those call transcripts and take out specific words and phrases and questions that customers are asking for. If you do not have that, then I would say mine. If you have a helpless system, the customer has a helpless system. If they have a review system, feedback system, mine those data, mine that information and see what customers are talking about. You’ll get a lot of good low-hanging fruits right there.

Again, understand these difficulty metrics. They are very, very subjective. What’s difficult for you may not be difficult for another customer. It depends on site authority. It depends on your brand visibility. If you're a new site, you have a sum total of 10 pages of content and five backlinks citing your website. It's going to be very hard to rank for anything. But if I have a10-year-old website and I have some good authority on authoritative websites, Impost people citing me, it will be easier for me to rank for anything. Okay. Sogo ahead and create those content clusters, cover topics from all angles, find low hanging fruits. We will be doing a detailed post about low hanging fruits and content cluster next week.

I will be distributing it to everybody who has signed up for this office hour session. And you will get to know whenever you post code live. Tools for the week. Yeah, there are a couple of things I was playing around with this week. One is relatively new to me and another is fairly old, at least a couple of years. I'm not sure if you've looked at it or not. So, I'm always in the lookout for new tools, especially the ones that are not too expensive. So, looking at this low-fruits patio because I was... helping my friend optimize one of his websites and he was from a niche that we do not usually cover fairly often. So, I found this to be fairly useful, trying to find our low-hanging fruits and clustering, creating clusters for that topic.

Give it a shot. It's fairly cheap compared to other tools. There's a stamp-free credit that you can find. If you find it useful, please use it. The second tool that I wanted to chat about today is I'm not sure how many of you actually go into the Google Sheet workspace and marketplace. There are some lovely tools over there. This one is a machine learning-based application for Google Sheets that you can install directly into Google Sheets. And how is this helpful? For starters, we always find it very difficult to go through hundreds of lines of information from search console data. So, if you're trying to spot outliers and over and under achieving content pieces or URLs based on impressions and position data, this can get the work done in literally minutes, at times seconds.

Just need to load up the information and follow the instructions. And the machine learning is very old school in a way. It doesn't have sharp Tenements like we do now, but maybe someone will come up with a tool like this soon. It helped me find those outliers that I was looking for, certain pages that are performing well above expectations or performing well below. And Theni take those and try and optimize them or take a decision on should I keep that page or not, or completely redo that page or that topic from scratch. Give it A shot.

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We'll include the link in the deck when we send it out. Tell me if you find this useful. Again, this is free. And earlier tool that I mentioned, nofruits.io, it's paid.

But I like free tools. That's it from me for today. Let me know if you guys have questions. If anyone has any questions, just send it in the chat. Youkan... send it to the group chat or just dm me directly meanwhile one question that came to me when we were talking about the author profiles, I think authority metrics, well discussed the question goes so will having author profiles Favor rankings now? I think this is an interesting I don't think so. I don’t think so. People oversold author profiles a while ago when the issue started rolling out. It happened with the EEAT algorithm updates and people started talking about it. I tested both. We tested both. We added author profiles. Did not help.

We removed author profiles. Content still ranked well. None of the long section of the content we write have author profiles. The only author profiles we add are to our blogs. So right now, it does not impact. Maybe that's one of the indicators of who's writing for who matters. Google is explicitly trying to create an algorithm that can be used in the future. Just because it does network well now does not mean it's not going to work in the future. For large sites, that's probably one way for them to determine or have something close as good as the backlink algorithm to understand authority. Look at it this way. We hire or we usually work with people who really, really understand a specific set of topics or are good at a specific set of tasks.

We call them specialists, right? You cannot be a specialist in more than nothing. If you are an SEO specialist, I doubt you are going to be a great writer. Okay. So, you're probably going to cover that one topic that you’re really good with from all different angles. That's one way for Google to understand what are your authoritative on, what topics or subjects that you can cover with authority. Then if you go on to write on a secondary website, is bound to have some effect in the near future. Is it going to impact local search right away? I don't believe so. There's no way it's going to scale up. If they try to do it, it's going to be other big fat mess like Google AI and generative overview.

Very true. Especially like you can't use it to just mask thin and low-quality content at all. you can't write bad content and then just. Yes, that is true. That is true. That's the reason why we try and cover things that we ourselves use on a daily basis yeah right interestingly I’m not sure if you should be talking about it. We got a couple of leads, opportunities from our video content. I thought nobody watches our videos. So that gives me an idea.do an interview series with business owners that you're working with. Launch another subject. Sorry, launch another service and call it authoritative video or author video or something like that. Give it a fancy name. You guys are better at it.

And launch a service where you do a series of videos with the businessowners. Not just a business owner.

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If you're working with an auto repair person, talk about different subjects. If you're working with an auto dealership, you can cover used car sales, new car sales, services, repairs, body shop. There are tons of people you can work with and do like 30 seconds or one minute video. Helpful guides and tips. They can have the virality effect. Put it on your channels. Put it on your social channels. Put it on YouTube. Put it on TikTok for all that matter. You don’t know where people are going to discover your content. Okay? We might all claim, oh, we have got the distribution channel set. We have got

we know how the discovery channel’s work. I see more and more opportunities coming from that we found you on chat GPT and like what? True. I think we can cover attribution in one of these sessions that we do going forward. It is Avery interesting topic and something that a lot of businesses and clients might be. But that's a topic that's relevant to larger businesses. most of the agencies, I don't think attribution is something that comes up easily. Butyral, we can cover it in passing. Give it some thought. Alright, I don't think we have any other questions. Thanks everyone for joining. Sorry if we rambled on a little bit towards the end. We have a lot of back and forth internally, Neil and I. So, alright, thank you.

Have a good rest of the week. Thanks for joining and we'll see you. Thanks for joining everyone. Bye-bye.

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