“Warning! Warning! ”
For me, the Google data leak was like the red lights silently flashing during an action scene. You know something important is looming, but you’re unsure how seriously to take the warnings.
I didn’t take the leak seriously until I saw how much the SEO and content production communities felt rocked by the documentation surrounding Google’s search ranking process.
Some of what we (SEOs and content marketers) suspected…surmised…predicted (not sure which is the right word here because all apply) was happening all along is now confirmed.
Meanwhile, we’re also finally seeing behind that wall that Google built to keep its search ranking factors a secret.
My Initial Thoughts
I saw Danny Goodwin’s article at Search Engine Land in my inbox early in the week, and of course, I clicked.
Danny summarized the meaning of the data leak and further interpreted many of the initial findings. At first, I wasn’t sure how this was relevant to me or my expertise.
But, as the week wore on, more analysis emerged, allowing me to see how this data leak could affect me. What I discovered is that:
- I feel reassured about my abilities because there is now conclusive evidence and thought pieces from other SEOs and content marketers backing up some of my thoughts on SEO and content.
- I now have documentation from Google that I can use to get buy-in from the C-suites when I propose strategies, projects, and budgets.
The first is somewhat self-congratulatory, but I needed something to remind me that my theories are not out of left field.
For example, I’ve been preaching for several years that brand-building is increasingly important to Google. So, I’ve been evangelizing about creating content strategies that go beyond simple lead generation to effectively create quality content that turns those leads into lifetime customers. It’s the primary service offering at my agency, Penpixel Creative.
The second is very functional.
Getting buy-in from SMBs or C-Suites has always been a balancing act for content marketers. Now, we have proof, straight from the horses’ mouth, of what Google uses to rank webpages and how it’s weighed in the grand scheme of things.
So, we can now create a strategy and show why certain aspects of that strategy are essential and need the budget.
Quotes From the Analysis of the Google Data Leak With My Thoughts
I’ll be pulling quotes from these two articles:
- Unpacking Google’s massive Search documentation leak — Andrew Ansley
- How SEO moves forward with the Google Content Warehouse API leak — Michael King
Here’s the original documentation if you want to sift through it.
Below, you’ll get the quote and the author to which it’s attributed. My thoughts will follow.
“Content needs to be more focused.”
Quote: Michael King, Search Engine Land
For me, the second and third sentences are significant.
This proves it’s essential to work with expert and experienced authors.
But guess what: Expert and experienced writers should be paid fairly for their work!
I don’t want to get on my soapbox here because it would detract from this article, but I’ll say this:
“Writing is not a “cheap skill.”
It takes study, practice, time, and experience to hone the skill. Hell, I’m still honing my writing skills.
So get out of the mindset that anyone can write your content or copy or that you can simply prompt AI to write a few thousand words for you.
Incidentally, we’re already seeing the impact of AI-generated content. It’s inhuman, can’t connect, and is poorly written. I firmly believe that people can quickly tell your content is AI-generated because they won’t feel all of these characteristics deep in their psyche.
So, expert writers who can produce quality content are in high demand and will be increasingly in high demand, and they will ask for rates that reward their expertise, experience, and quality.
“Pay attention to what happens after they leave your site.”
Quote: Michael King, Search Engine Land
This one is more for Content Strategists. Some of you already do this, but it’s time to start for those who are not.
We aim to produce the best content that keeps visitors on your site. We win by knowing what they’re looking for and presenting that information to them. So, if users navigate from your site to others to find information, why not simply add that relevant information to your site?
I foresee this becoming a massive part of the Ranch Style SEO + Information Gain content strategy that Jeffrey Lupo and I have been discussing lately. I haven’t worked out exactly how it will play into this new type of content strategy, but my gut tells me it will be necessary.
“Page titles can be as long as you want.”
Quote: Michael King, Search Engine Land
This idea is a touchy one for me. I hate flowery titles with too many “power words” or adjectives like,
“Harness the Power: 13 Benefits of Hobbies for Men”
or
“Ignite Passion: 13 Powerful Benefits of Hobbies for Men.”
**Full disclosure: ChatGPT generated those for me after I asked it for titles with emotional and power words that were about 65 characters long.**
My problem is those titles seem “click-baity.” In fact, they don’t seem “click-baity”; they ARE click-bait.
Now, I know I can structure my titles to better imply the content quality and information you’re clicking into. Here’s one that I would have liked to use but always felt character count limited me:
“The Hobbies Every Man Should Consider Trying for Enhanced Well-being and Self-confidence”
Notice this version is less sensational and more straightforward? I feel this type of title adds to the piece’s E-E-A-T score.
“Focus on link relevance from sites with traffic.”
Quote: Michael King, Search Engine Land
So, a few things here:
First, this snippet mentions Google’s flash memory. From the context, I guess this means that if your pages get more clicks, then Google stores them for quick access so they appear in relevant search results more often.
To me, this information is important because it illustrates the loop that Google’s algo causes and why more prominent brands consistently rank higher for search terms. The more clicks you get, the higher you rank, which means more clicks, meaning you’ll rank higher…etc.
Getting you to the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) if you have low clicks or are not a big brand is why SEO exists.
The second part of that snippet is crucial because it tells me that linking to high-volume pages isn’t necessarily the best way to increase your page’s SERP rankings. Michael King sums this up in a key points section at the end of his article when he mentions,
“Links that don’t match the target site will hurt your score.”
Andrew Ansley is even more shocked in his article when he talks about how anchor text is addressed in the leaked data:
“How is no one talking about this one? [There is] An entire page dedicated to anchor text observation, measurement, calculation and assessment.”
I’ve found that there is still not one “best practice” for using anchor text, but it’s been generally agreed that linking to high domain authority (DA) pages or sites is the best way to get “link juice” to your page.
I’ve fluctuated back and forth, but I’ve settled on asking my writers to link to pages with more relevance than DA. This solution is helpful for the reader, but it sometimes means more work for the writer. They must dig deeper for relevant, quality information about their thoughts or ideas.
But sometimes, writers get lazy about the anchor text and links, causing extra work for editors. But if you provide the writer the sources, or if they’re expert researchers, they’ll link to the relevant information, regardless of the DA.
“Default to originality instead of long form”
Quote: Michael King, Search Engine Land
Focus…on…originality…
I. Love. This.
Here’s why ChatGPT, AI, and search generative experience (SGE) has screwed a lot of SEO Content agencies:
What they would do is sell you SEO and content writing services, and then hire writers for about one penny to ten cents a word to review the pages ranking for a search term quickly, and then essentially sum up the top ranking pages on a new article with a pre-determined word count.
This is then published on your site as a “new page.”
The problem is that you’re not actually getting new information, and the information presented isn’t actually helpful; it’s just a summary of other articles packaged and published with your company name on them.
Sound familiar? That’s because ChatGPT and SGE do this now.
So, all that top-of-funnel awareness content is now generated by Gemini or ChatGPT. SEO content agencies can no longer use that content production model. They must now put more effort into your content production, and they don’t like that because more effort means less ROI for them.
The solution to this ties into what I told you about working with expert, experienced writers. They can process industry news and information, apply their knowledge, and then come up with specific, new applications for your product in unique use cases.
In non-specialist terms, they create new information instead of regurgitating other company’s information.
That means your company is seen as a unique solution to your audience’s problems.
“Google has a specific method of identifying business models.”
Quote: Andrew Ansley, Search Engine Land
Although they say it’s unclear why Google is filtering for small blogs, I have some distrust here.
Could it be because Google wants to de-rank smaller blogs and up-rank bigger brands?
Is it that Google wants to see where innovation happens first and then emulate it before the smaller brands successfully become bigger?
Are they trying to “protect us” from fake or false information?
“Short content can rank.”
Quote: Andrew Ansley, Search Engine Land
I have always thought that longer-form content has a higher chance of ranking. I assumed that’s because longer content would organically address several aspects of a user’s search.
But this makes a lot of sense to me now.
As search evolves and our preferences for obtaining information become refined, shorter blogs make sense because they get to the point and answer the question.
If they’re done well, they’ll still point the reader on to the next step in their journey. This is a large part of the new Ranch Style SEO content strategy I alluded to earlier.
Also, think about YouTube and social media.
Wyzowl’s YouTube video stats say that the average length is 4.4 minutes. Others say that time is decreasing quickly. I speculate that’s why YouTube shorts and TikToks are so popular.
People want the information, they want it quickly, and they want to move on with their lives. With this in mind, shorter content will increasingly rank higher.
“Scoring in the absence of measurement.”
Quote: Andrew Ansley, Search Engine Land
I’ve highlighted the most important part of Andrew’s assessment here while leaving the rest for context.
It looks like Google is chunking up your site and giving each chunk a quality score. So, for your entire site to have a good quality score, all your content must be high quality.
Once again, “quality content” is hammered into our heads. I imagine quality content is content that follows the E-E-A-T guidelines.
Andrew Ansley’s Actionable Advice With My Added Context
Ansley gave SEOs nine pieces of advice they can take to begin improving sites now that the leak analysis results are coming in. Below are the advice snippets I feel directly apply to content strategy, with some of my thoughts and questions. I’m hoping some of you will weigh in, too.
“Invest in a well-designed site with intuitive architecture.”
“You should invest in a well-designed site with intuitive architecture so you can optimize for NavBoost.”
NavBoost is an algo that tracks user interaction with your site.
We’ve known or suspected for some time that user interaction is telling. I’ve interpreted this as bounce rate and would counsel clients to improve their UX and content to meet user needs to decrease bounce rate.
There’s also the “3-click” rule that implies users should be able to find what they need on your site within three clicks.
If you think about this, you know that if you get to a site and:
- It loads slowly,
- The immediate information doesn’t satisfy your needs,
- It’s hard to navigate…
You bounce from the site immediately.
So we now have evidence that Google records this user data, calculates a score, and weighs that score in your site quality score.
“Optimize [y]our headings.”
“Because embeddings are used on a page-by-page and site-wide basis, we must optimize our headings around queries and make the paragraphs under the headings answer those queries clearly and succinctly.”
Embeddings are numerical representations of text that capture relationships between words and phrases.
I guess this means that optimized headings allow Google to better associate your heading and its related paragraph with the user’s query.
SEOs and Content Strategists have been optimizing headlines for years in hopes of appearing as the featured snippet for a query. This increases a site’s click-through rate (CTR).
I’ve been wondering how this is going to play into SGE. Any thoughts?
Overall, let’s consider this from the user’s perspective: If the heading and the information beneath answer my query, I’m happy.
I prefer the “keep it simple stupid” (KISS) method for headings. Use the keyword or a semantic, keep the heading short, and answer the question in the first sentence of the supporting text using the inverted pyramid style of writing.
“Write more content that can earn more impressions and clicks.”
“Clicks and impressions are aggregated and applied on a topical basis, so you should write more content that can earn more impressions and clicks. Even if you’re only chipping away at the impression and click count, if you provide a good experience and are consistent with your topic expansion, you’ll start winning, according to the leaked docs.”
This sounds like he’s suggesting we write click-bait content. I don’t know. What do you think? Or is this to reinforce the content quality idea?
“It is very important to update your content” and “Maintain high-quality content.”
“Irregularly updated content has the lowest storage priority for Google and is definitely not showing up for freshness. It is very important to update your content. Seek ways to update the content by adding unique info, new images, and video content. Aim to kill two birds with one stone by scoring high on the “effort calculations” metric.”
“While it’s difficult to maintain high-quality content and publishing frequency, there is a reward. Google is applying site-level chard scores, which predict site/page quality based on your content. Google measures variances in any way you can imagine, so consistency is key.”
I learned that regularly updating content is immensely important to rankings while I managed several affiliate marketing sites. We published upwards of 80 new pages monthly (sometimes weekly) per site to send those signals to Google.
I also learned that publishing new content and updating on a consistent schedule was f-king hard and took a lot of work from more than a few writers and editors, plus me managing all that content while strategizing. It was more than a tiny one—or two-person team could handle, and it required more than 40 hours a week if you wanted to do it well and not feel like you were letting the company, client, or yourself down.
This is why I feel the frustrations of Content Marketers who are mistakenly asked to do all of these tasks alone:
- Plan a strategy.
- Execute SEO
- Create social media.
- Write marketing blogs, articles, and materials or manage the writers and editors.
- Monitor performance and report weekly or monthly.
Each task requires several steps to execute well. There are now tools that are helping us become one-person marketing armies, but the struggle is still real.
What’s the solution?
Stop taking your content marketing for granted and work with an agency or hire a team. Whichever will fulfill your company goals and deliver the best ROI.
“Remove poorly performing pages.”
“Remove poorly performing pages. If user metrics are bad, no links point to the page and the page has had plenty of opportunity to thrive, then that page should be eliminated. Site-wide scores and scoring averages are mentioned throughout the leaked docs, and it is just as valuable to delete the weakest links as it is to optimize your new article (with some caveats).”
This one is self-explanatory, but I needed to hear it because removing pages has always been counterintuitive in my head.
I tend to look at the page, assess its content, and then determine where it needs improvements. However, this has only sometimes worked, costing time and money with no ROI. You still need to pay the content creators, writers, and editors for their time.
I’ll need to learn to let myself embrace this theory, and you should, too.
Final Thoughts and Remaining Questions
You know what’s funny? Google says it can’t “understand content” naturally and meaningfully.
Sure, it can identify keywords, infer the topics and meanings, and assign its measurements to help the algo rank and show information.
But it can’t really understand the nuances of content, can it?
So why is Google telling us that content quality matters? Wouldn’t it have to understand the content in its entirety to measure its quality?
Long/short, Google says it’s increasingly focusing on the quality of your content. I think they’re still vague about what they deem “quality content,” but this data leak gives us some direction.
It seems they’re also saying that bigger brands are what Google considers “quality content.”
I can’t yet quantify how much more knowledgeable or confident I am about Google now. But I know that creating content your audience wants or needs is all that matters.
You now have to put thought into your entire content strategy and ecosystem because they all increasingly tie in with each other.
You cannot silo your content programs anymore.
Deven Bhagwandin 