Last Update: June 14th, 2024
Everyone is doing a deep dive of Google's algorithm leak. You have pages and pages of blogs being written analyzing everything and anything from the leak. It makes sense, this leak was monumental! There is so much to learn from it, so many ways to analyze it.
However, most of you don't care about being experts in the leak. You just want to know the basics, the simple question: "What do I need to know?"
You ask and we deliver, here is our quick hits on what you need to know regarding Google's algorithm leak. Clean, clear, and straight to the point.
Positive Points: Things That Will Help You
- Apparently it matters who the author is of a post and having that author publishing similar type of content.
- A metric called sourceType that shows a loose relationship between the where a page is indexed and how valuable it is. Effectively, this is saying the higher the tier, the more valuable the link. Pages that are considered “fresh” are also considered high quality. Suffice it to say, you want your links to come from pages that either fresh or are otherwise featured in the top tier.
- Google only stores the 20 latest versions of a page. This should give you a sense of how many times you need to change pages and have them indexed to get a “clean slate” in Google.
- Google decides how to value a link based on how much they trust the homepage. Focus on strengthening the homepage first and then sub-pages.
- Google is tracking the average weighted font size of terms in documents. They are doing the same thing for anchor texts. Make sure any anchor text you get is bolded.
- The documentation indicates that there is a titlematchScore. The description suggests that how well the page title matches the query is still something that Google actively gives value to.
- The OriginalContentScore suggests that short content is scored for its originality. This is probably why thin content is not always a function of length. The shorter the content, the more original it must be.
- This reinforces what we’ve seen tested many times, lengthy page titles are suboptimal for driving clicks, but they are fine for driving rankings. So a long title won’t hurt your ranking but it will hurt your clicks and clicks are influenced in the rank so still try to keep the titles within character limits.
- Google is very focused on fresh results and the documents illustrate its numerous attempts to associate dates with pages. Put dates on each page and make sure it is accurate, if not you’ll be demoted.
Negative Points: Things That Will Hurt You
- Anchor Mismatch – When the link does not match the target site it’s linking to, the link is demoted on the calculations. As I’ve said before, Google is looking for relevance on both sides of a link.
- SERP Demotion – A signal indicating demotion based on factors observed from the SERP, suggesting potential user dissatisfaction with the page as likely measured by clicks.
- Nav Demotion – Presumably, this is a demotion applied to pages exhibiting poor navigation practices or user experience issues.
- Exact Match Domains Demotion – In late 2012, Matt Cutts announced that exact match domains would not get as much value as they did historically. There is a specific feature for their demotion.
- Product Review Demotion – There’s no specific information on this, but it’s listed as a demotion and probably related to 2023’s recent product reviews update.
- Location demotions – There is an indication that “global” pages and “super global” pages can be demoted. This suggests that Google attempts to associate pages with a location and rank them accordingly.
- Porn demotions – This one is pretty obvious.
- Other link demotions – We’ll discuss in the next section.
Have questions? Shoot me an email: david@tinylevermarketing.com
