Google should apologize to me and the public for releasing the documents that have been released by Google about Google’s discovery of the algorithm and how it affects the search engine
When it comes to search, the choices that GOOGLE makes have a profound impact on everyone who uses the web for business. In turn, an industry of people hoping to crack the code or outsmart the algorithm has cropped up, delivering sometimes conflicting answers. Google’s vagueness and mincing of words has not helped, but the influx of internal documents offers, at least, a sense of what the company dominating the web is thinking.
“Historically, some of the search industry’s loudest voices and most prolific publishers have been happy to uncritically repeat Google’s public statements. They write headlines like ‘Google says XYZ is true,’ rather than ‘Google Claims XYZ; Evidence Suggests Otherwise,’” Fishkin writes. Do better, please. If the DOJ trial and leak can create just a single change, I hope so.
“‘Lied’ is harsh, but it’s the only accurate word to use here,” King writes. “While I don’t necessarily fault Google’s public representatives for protecting their proprietary information, I do take issue with their efforts to actively discredit people in the marketing, tech, and journalism worlds who have presented reproducible discoveries.”
Fishkin and King cite an example where the data fromChrome may or may not be used in ranking. Chrome is mentioned in some of the sections about how websites appear in Search, but that doesn’t mean that it’s used to rank pages. In the screenshot below, which I captured as an example, the links appearing below the main vogue.com URL may be created in part using Chrome data, according to the documents.
Another question raised is what role, if any, E-E-A-T plays in ranking. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, a Google metric used to evaluate the quality of results. E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor, as was previously said by representatives of the internet giant. Fishkin notes that there are no documents mentioning the name E-E-A-T.
King, however, detailed how Google appears to collect author data from a page and has a field for whether an entity on the page is the author. A portion of the documents shared by King states that the field is mainly developed for news articles but also contains other content like scientific articles. It shows that the attribute of bylines is something that is tracked by the internet giant. Google representatives have previously insisted that author bylines are something website owners should do for readers, not Google, because it doesn’t impact rankings.