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> Though the documents aren’t exactly a smoking gun Smoking gun of what? The article never seems to actually say. The only accusation I see is that SEO grifte

> Though the documents aren’t exactly a smoking gun Smoking gun of what? The article never seems to actually say. The only accusation I see is that SEO grifters were lied to by Google Search docs, but you look at the article like[1] it's over things like "Google always said Domain Authority isn't a thing, but we found a variable site_authority. We don't know what it's for or what it does, but clearly we were right". Which, even if true, isn't a thing I care about at all... [1] https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak https://ipullrank.com/google-algo-leak

xnx 2y ago
SEO discussion is notoriously high noise and low signal. It's mainly conjecture, assumption, and superstition. Like a lot of things, if they knew what worked, they wouldn't be sharing it.
iamacyborg 2y ago
I’m not sure calling folks like Rand Fishkin a grifter is all that accurate, to put it politely.
Scoundreller 2y ago
I believe for a while that Google didn’t consider Domain Authority much. For a while, I would create pages like “Bank of XYZ Phone Numbers” or “Phone Numbers for $ThatTelecomYouHate” and often rank #1. Which made sense, because my page was just a very parseable page of their actual phone numbers, but obviously risk for harm there. Phone numbers on the actual orgs’ websites were hard to find because, well, they wanted you to do anything but call them because calling cost them money. And the big corp websites were always an SEO mess that I’m not surprised a crawler could not comprehend. Of course the ads were all for competitors, so I enjoyed making money and costing them customers at the same time. After some years, Google would start returning you 10 different results from the orgs’ websites, playing into their hand of having you do anything but call your bank/telco.
makeitdouble 2y ago
Publicly lying about how a core product works is notable, and would be a big deal for any other company. Reminds me of Apple's "we treat all developers equally" statements before it was made clear Spotify didn't pay a dime on their in-app subs. You're right that the real impact is limited though, people woun't be moving to another search engine anyway.

xnx 2y ago

SEO discussion is notoriously high noise and low signal. It's mainly conjecture, assumption, and superstition. Like a lot of things, if they knew what worked, they wouldn't be sharing it.

iamacyborg 2y ago

I’m not sure calling folks like Rand Fishkin a grifter is all that accurate, to put it politely.

Scoundreller 2y ago

I believe for a while that Google didn’t consider Domain Authority much. For a while, I would create pages like “Bank of XYZ Phone Numbers” or “Phone Numbers for $ThatTelecomYouHate” and often rank #1. Which made sense, because my page was just a very parseable page of their actual phone numbers, but obviously risk for harm there. Phone numbers on the actual orgs’ websites were hard to find because, well, they wanted you to do anything but call them because calling cost them money. And the big corp websites were always an SEO mess that I’m not surprised a crawler could not comprehend. Of course the ads were all for competitors, so I enjoyed making money and costing them customers at the same time. After some years, Google would start returning you 10 different results from the orgs’ websites, playing into their hand of having you do anything but call your bank/telco.

makeitdouble 2y ago

Publicly lying about how a core product works is notable, and would be a big deal for any other company. Reminds me of Apple's "we treat all developers equally" statements before it was made clear Spotify didn't pay a dime on their in-app subs. You're right that the real impact is limited though, people woun't be moving to another search engine anyway.