The Gist
- Validation confirmed. The leak confirms long-suspected SEO strategies.
- Improved test methods. New data will likely drive refined SEO testing techniques.
- Actionable insights revealed. Key SEO tactics for sustained growth detailed.
As a search engine optimization (SEO) professional for the past 10 years, reverse engineering the nebulous google algorithm has consumed much of my time and energy.
So when news hit that the algorithm was accidentally published via internal API documentation on GitHub, I certainly paid attention. The documentation, which includes over 2,500 pages and over 14,000 lines of code describing Google’s search ranking mechanisms, was publicly available from March 27 to May 7, 2024.
During this period, the data was indexed by third-party services, making it available even after Google removed it from GitHub. So the most guarded and prized algorithm in our history has been leaked to the public. Does it change everything about how SEOs work? Surprisingly not. Let’s take a closer look at Google’s algorithm leak and 10 search engine optimization insights.
Google Algorithm Leak: Testers Validate Practices
As Ted Kubaitis, founder and CEO of SEO Tool Lab claimed, “The leak mostly confirmed a lot of things SEO testers have already known for years. Kudos to the SEO testing groups who used scientific methods to get this information years in advance For the leak, this leak will give these test groups more ideas on what and how to test, for example, triggering a peak of spam anchors can result in a penalty peaks of different sizes over different time frames to find out best practices.”
Google Algorithm Leak Reveals Debated SEO Theories
While many theories from the more than 14,000 lines of code have been tested in masterminds and test groups, one problem with this Google algorithm leak is that we still don’t know which factors are more important than others. Many theories that SEOs have confirmed through testing that Google publicly condemned appear in these lines of code.
As the dust begins to settle, many website owners are left with more questions than answers. Where do we go from here? What is actionable? Below, we break down 10 actionable insights from the Google algorithm leak and steps to help your brand continue to grow online in 2024 and beyond.
Increase brand visibility with these 10 strategic SEO steps
1. Become a bigger brand
OK, let’s address the basics first. Google has stated that site-wide views are part of the Quality NSR data. Some obvious ways to increase site-wide views would be to start driving another source of traffic to your site like Facebook, Reddit, Bing or Google Ads, or to build a more robust content strategy.
Pro tip: Instead of building your pay-per-click landing pages on a subdomain that isn’t indexed, it’s best to incorporate it into your site if at all possible to take advantage of this factor.
Related Article: Master Your B2B Content Strategy Like a Pro
2. Monitor your navigation
Make sure you have a user-centric design that makes it easy for users to find what they’re looking for. Include links to your most important pages in the top navigation. This ensures that these pages receive sufficient internal link equity and are easily discovered by search engines.
Pro tip: Put the most important categories in the primary navigation and other landing pages in the secondary nav. This helps distribute link properties throughout your site and helps increase the authority of deeper pages. Double check how this looks on mobile vs. desktop.
Related Article: Not Your Parents’ Mobile UX Design Strategy
3. Add a table of contents to blog posts
Click-through rate, dwell time and engagement signals on a page make a real impact. Adding a table of contents can help with UX elements such as ease of navigation, improved readability, engagement (dwell time) and getting your pages displayed as rich snippet results.
Pro tip: If the TOC length is getting out of control, make it an expandable dropdown menu. This should also help with engagement signals.
Related Article: UI vs. UX Design: What’s the Difference?
4. Add authorship to all blog posts
Google seeks to reward real websites with real people behind them. An easy way to help your website here is by linking each blog post to a real author or person in the company. Each post should have a short author bio at the bottom that includes credentials, social profiles and a link to its author bio.
An author bio should have more in-depth information, including any awards, leadership signals, and all of their posts. For higher stakes content, you’ll want to add a “reviewed by” section with someone who is an authority on the topic. It is important to highlight this at the bottom of the post in an author box format as well as in the schema code with the article schema with the corresponding author and “reviewed by” information.
Pro tip: Create a Google Local Guide profile for your authors that is active. Some will go as far as publishing an e-book on Amazon.
Related Article: The Google SEO Leak That Could Change Your Marketing Strategy
5. Update the content publication date
Google has a freshness algorithm that prioritizes new content for certain search queries, especially those that are time-sensitive or related to current events. This means that newer content can rank higher for queries where the latest information is deemed more relevant. Users tend to prefer and engage more with updated content, which then leads to higher click-through rates (CTR) and better user engagement metrics, which are positive signals for search engines.
Pro tip: When updating your content, make some edits as high up on the page as possible, even if you’re just rewriting the first paragraph.
Related Article: Customer Experience Measurements: 3 Steps That Drive Growth
6. Take advantage of digital PR
Using digital press releases isn’t just a brand-building game. Both brand mentions and high-quality links from credible sources to your site equal higher exposures, along with direct visibility on Google’s news pages.
Pro tip: Put your most important links at the top of the press release, as google (and users) give these more weight
7. Tap Every link with a link
Tiered link building is an advanced SEO strategy designed to improve the authority and ranking of a website by creating multiple layers (tiers) of backlinks. Tiered link building often results in internal pages being linked to more often. This can help Google’s crawlers discover and index more pages on your site and improve the site’s overall visibility along with more votes for a particular page.
Pro tip: Use high quality guest post links as your first level of links to your money pages. From there, you can get creative with less costly and time-consuming links to touch them. Keep all anchor text (hyperlinks) relevant to the topic you want to rank for.
8. Add interactive content
There are several ways to increase the engagement rate with interactive content:
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Interactive content such as quizzes, calculators, poles and surveys are fun and engaging.
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Multimedia content such as videos, infographics and podcasts keep users on the page longer, are more engaging than plain text and can be easily shared.
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User Generated Content like comments on posts or reviews of an e-commerce product help keep pages fresh and show both engagement and trust (although this requires consistent monitoring).
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Social share buttons to your content to make it easy for users to share with their network.
Pro tip: Add a video to the top of your main content pages to summarize the content. This will not only help conversion rates, but keep the user on the page significantly longer
Related Article: A Marketing Leader’s Path Forward in the Digital Era
9. Increase branded search
Google also seems to correlate the volume of branded searches with the number of links it credits to a given site. So increasing the volume of searches for your brand can both increase your number of exposures and maximize your link profile. In addition to the suggestions given to increase views, maintaining a consistent and active presence on major social media platforms is a great way to do this. Share engaging content, engage with followers and use branded hashtags. Also, offline activities such as event hosting, sponsorships and partnerships all help to achieve this goal.
Pro tip: For your link in bio to social profiles, link to the Google search result for your brand name where you rank #1 with prominent presence across the page.
10. Build your current map — with consistency
Websites that thoroughly cover a particular topic are considered authoritative. This means providing in-depth articles, guides, FAQs, and different types of content that cover all aspects of a topic. These should have relevant author information, citations and references with a good internal link structure leading to your money pages.
For years I have seen an increase in results with clients who publish content regularly given any frequency (as little as one to two blogs per month). There seems to be a rate cap as SEOs really tried to push the limits to publish as many as 1,000 new posts a day with the AI revolution and some clever coding until the smackdown on May 6th. A safe bet is to see what your competitors are doing and slightly outdo them.
Pro tip: Batch your current content together and submit the URLs to the search console together. This seems to give a quick relevancy boost.
Final thoughts
The latest Google algorithm leak documentation confirms many known SEO strategies while highlighting new areas for improvement. Business owners should focus on building brand presence, optimizing website navigation, updating content regularly, leveraging digital PR and increasing engagement through interactive content and incremental link building.
By implementing these actionable insights, you can improve your website’s SEO, improve search rankings, and drive sustainable growth in 2024 and beyond.
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