Google Search Data Leak – Did Google Lie to Us?

Podcast Transcript:

 Breaking news! Google search ranking features leaked over 14, 000 ranking factors that were shared apparently online in the last several hours. Here’s my take on it because surprising or not, I’m actually not crazy surprised with them. These ranking factors leaked is not so shocking because there’s a lot of the information and thoughts that I’ve always shared for many, many years now.

That I feel like Google just disguises in a way that they don’t want you to know the truth Not that they’re lying or hiding it. It’s just they don’t want people to abuse them So in this video i’m going to talk a little bit about why this leak is probably legit And what I think about it Hey, welcome to another episode of local seo unlock.

My name is christian hustle pleasure to have you here If you are new to the show or even coming back consider subscribing give it a like to the to the video And again, we’re talking about some data leaked from google that has over 14 000 ranking factors And the community and the seo community is is talking about it.

Everybody is wondering what the hell is going on The as of the time of this recording this data is still available online You And I do not want to include a screenshot of any kind because I’m sure attorneys are in the works from on the on google Side, so I don’t want to be related to that. I just want to give my thoughts on what I think I actually don’t want to really go into depth with how the data was leaked or anything like that This is just educational purposes and my thoughts on this.

So a lot of these leaked ranking factors are talking a lot about Many many things that google actually says It’s publicly said the opposite. Uh, I saw comments online on Twitter from many, many well known SEOs that are talking about how websites do go into a sandbox, even though Google has said, no, that doesn’t happen.

How Google does has a way to grade a website’s authority and how that impacts ranking. I’ve said it for many years. I mean, there is a reason why we have many clients in the automotive industry where local dealerships. Even if you invest heavily, yes, there’s ways to do it, but it’s very hard to outrank websites like cars.

com or other very, very well known websites because of their authority, right? And, and this is something that is not just domain authority that we’re talking about. Um, I don’t have a specific name for it, but I, when I talk to clients, I basically just say an industry authority, if you like. Where these websites are so powerful and within the industry that they have they are prioritized to my to my opinion From what i’ve seen through the last 12 15 years of seo.

They are definitely ahead of the game They get advantages towards other brands like local dealerships or local auto groups as well Now there’s always also been the other discussion that i’ve always talked about as well is link building You know google tries not to incentivize link building Link building Where in the last 12 months they would talk about it once right so that they don’t really spot it on your radar Now link building since day one since I started seo many years ago continues to be to me One of the strongest ranking factors if done properly right if done white hat 100 Focus on quality.

We see tremendous results from that now This is just one of those where again, I don’t think google lies. I don’t think google hides You It’s just part of the way they work, right? They don’t want people to really understand the algorithms because then people have used it And and I think this is one of those cases where people are questioning how legitimate it is or not I think it’s a lot of the information is legitimate because It’s just from my experience, from what I’ve seen, either Google just doesn’t talk about it or tries to minimize the information, just like link building, right, when they’re talking about it.

And there’s a lot of this report that is similar, where the report is shining light on some of the factors that, That experience SEOs know that are important, that maybe Google is not talking about. But I think this is where experience really comes in, because this is why you couldn’t trust ChatGPT to do your entire SEO strategy.

Because if you go by Google guidelines, which, yes, I mean, it’s good to follow, you know, there are rules that you don’t want to break. But if you just go by that, or if you just go by well known ranking factors and you ignore all these years of experience that chat GPT doesn’t necessarily have is where you can fall into those traps where, you know, chat GPT may tell you, Hey, Google things that link building is black.

So you don’t do blink building and you’re going to miss out on rankings heavily. You’re going to miss out on traffic when you talk to an experience. I see, obviously it’s the opposite, but anyway, going back to our topic. I mean, I think there’s going to be a lot of. Of information coming out live after this leak.

Is there anything really new that we haven’t discovered through the years? Maybe this later leak will give us some answers finally to some of the unanswered questions that we’ve had for years Time will tell right let’s analyze it Let’s break it down and let’s see where it goes But I will keep you posted as we find more information about this And again, I don’t think is going to be anything crazy new Uh, or crazy shocking revealing but time will tell let’s see where this goes.

All right Well, thank you so much for watching again Hit that like hit that subscribe button share this video with a colleague if you saw value in it And drop your thoughts in the comments. I’m very curious to hear If you had a chance to review this documentation what you heard about or if you’ve ever noticed that There are ranking factors that you’ve been playing with that you as a marketer Have influenced or been trying to optimize towards and you saw great success regardless of what google says about it That’s really what I want to hear.

All right. I’ll see you on the next episode