Over the past few hours, it has emerged that various seemingly legitimate internal Google documents have surfaced.
The “leak” is still active, which I won’t directly link to, and was revealed by someone who wished to remain anonymous by sharing the data with Sparktoro founder Rand Fishkin.
I’ve spent the last hour going through the docs trying to find something interesting, so I thought I’d share some ideas here.
As a disclaimer, this information may not be legitimate, may be outdated, or may have nothing to do with the Google we use today. Many may only apply to certain aspects of Google (like Google News). As someone who has been practicing and writing about SEO for 17 years, I find it simply fascinating to look through the data.
My take is that these are fun and interesting to look at from an SEO perspective, but I wouldn’t use them to dictate your business strategy.
If anything, it’s nice to seemingly have confirmation of a number of ideas that SEOs have been preaching for years.
isNonLocationSpecific
Creation date And Expiration date
isNofollow
I was particularly interested in the comment that “if the page contains multiple links to the same URL, they all need to be nofollow to set this field”.
title
This refers to Shopping, rather than Google as a whole.
phraseAnchorSpamCount
Honestly, I think this is all pretty interesting.
QualityTravelGoodSitesData
I have not yet noticed that categories other than travel are referenced in this way.
NewsScore
It’s always interesting to see specific sites mentioned, like AppleInsider in this case.
onSiteProminence
environmentOrPeopleEntities
Thanks to Mike King for iPullRank who has great feedback on this and was instrumental in uncovering the data.
