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4 min read

Google's Ranking Factors Leaked: How to Boost Your Website’s SEO

Boosting Your Website's SEO through Google's Ranking Factors | Vested
8:58

Recently, over 2,500 pages of Google’s ranking factors were leaked, offering a glimpse into what influences search engine rankings. Here are the essential takeaways from the leak and how to enhance your website's SEO.

About the Google Leak

The leak was revealed by SEO expert Rand Fishkin, who received Google's Ranking Factor documents anonymously. Google has confirmed the authenticity of the leak but claims the information is outdated and taken out of context. Nevertheless, these insights are valuable for understanding Google's best practices and how SEO works with Google.

A few months before the leak, Google was forced to explain how their algorithm works. These court files are known as the DOJ Files, revealing how Google ranks a page using "The 3 Pillars of Ranking".

Google search results for "The 3 Pillars of Ranking" on Google in a laptop graphic

While Google states this information is outdated and the weighting of each pillar remains confidential, it highlights the importance of creating high-quality content that has backlinks and that users interact with.

Breaking Down the Leaked Google Documents

1. Engagement and Quality Content

The quality of your content is not only about writing well but also about providing real value to your audience, solving their problems, and answering their questions. This helps build trust and authority, encouraging users to return to your site and engage more deeply with your content. High engagement indicates that users find your content valuable and are spending time interacting with it. This signals to search engines that your site provides valuable information that users find useful and relevant.

The Google Leak highlighted that creating original and relevant content, including unique images, and higher user interaction with your website lead to better rankings.


2. Original Images

Search engines, like Google, prioritize original content, including images. Original images are often more engaging and interesting to users, keeping them on your site longer. Using unique, custom-created visuals that are specific to your content and not duplicated from other sources can significantly boost your SEO.

According to the leaked Google documents, Google favors websites that contain original images.

Suggestions for ensuring image originality:

  • Take your own photos relevant to your content. This is particularly useful for product images, team photos, or event coverage.
  • Design custom illustrations, infographics, and graphics that are tailored to your content. Tools like Adobe Illustrator or Canva can be helpful.
  • If you must use stock images, customize them significantly. This can include cropping, adding text overlays, changing colors, or combining multiple images to create something new.
  • When taking photos, use unique angles and compositions that are not commonly found elsewhere.

3. User Experience (UX)

User experience (UX) refers to the overall experience a user has when interacting with a website or digital product. It encompasses all aspects of the user's interaction, including usability, accessibility (and following WCAG guidelines), performance, design, and satisfaction. The goal of good UX is to create a seamless, efficient, and enjoyable experience for the user.

  • Loading Speed: Websites should load within 2-3 seconds to retain users and improve rankings.
  • Navigation: Simple and intuitive top menus, footers, and breadcrumbs enhance user experience and help search engine crawlers.
  • Readability: Ensure your content is easy to read on both mobile and desktop with appropriate headings, short sentences, and readable fonts.

This is not new information, however based on the documents, does play an important role in SEO.

4. Content Freshness

Content freshness refers to the regular updating and creation of new content on your website. Fresh content is considered more relevant and valuable by both users and search engines.

According to the leaked documents, it's important to keep your content updated regularly, as Google considers the last 20 versions of a page during its ranking process.

Regular updates help maintain a positive historical context for your content, stay ahead of competitors who might have outdated information, and prompt Google to crawl your site more frequently, ensuring your new content is indexed and ranked promptly.

5. Entities and Salience

Google understand and organizes information by the use of entities, rather than keywords. 

Entities refer to specific, distinct, and recognizable objects, people, places, or concepts. Unlike keywords, which are just strings of text, entities have a unique identity and can be understood in context. For example, in an article about "Leonardo da Vinci," the entity is "Leonardo da Vinci," and it connects to other entities like "Mona Lisa," "Renaissance," and "Vitruvian Man."

Although this isn't new information, the leak noted that Google also takes entity salience into account when ranking content.

Salience refers to the importance or prominence of an entity within a piece of content. It indicates how central a particular entity is to the main topic or theme of the content. For example, in a biography of "Leonardo da Vinci," entities like "Renaissance" and "Mona Lisa" would have high salience, indicating their importance in understanding his life and work.

By focusing on entities and their salience, Google can provide more relevant and accurate search results, improving the overall search experience for users. For content creators and SEO professionals, understanding and leveraging these concepts can lead to better visibility and higher rankings in search results.

6. Impressions and Clicks

Impressions refer to the number of times a webpage or piece of content appears in the search results. Each time a user sees a link to your website in the search results, it counts as an impression, regardless of whether they click on it or not.

The Google leak highlighted the importance of both impressions, how many times your pages appear on the search result page, and clicks in determining search rankings.

7. Backlinks

Fresh and relevant backlinks are now being prioritized over high-authority links.

The leaked documents read that Google values recent backlinks over older high-authority ones because they signal current relevance, active engagement, and updated information. While older, high-authority backlinks still play an important role in establishing credibility and trust, recent backlinks help demonstrate that the content continues to be relevant and valuable in today’s context.

8. Avoiding Spam

Spam content refers to low-quality or manipulative content created to deceive search engines and users. It often aims to artificially boost (using AI) a website's rankings or traffic without providing real value.

In the leaked documents, Google detailed how user interactions contribute to assessing a website's usefulness, thereby influencing its rankings.

Such practices, listed below, undermine the quality of search results and the user experience, which is contrary to the goals of search engines to provide relevant and useful information.

  • High-Quality Content: Avoid using low-quality, AI-generated content, or spun content.
  • Keyword Stuffing: Do not overuse keywords, as it negatively impacts content quality and user experience.
  • Excessive Ads: Limit the number of ads to prevent them from overwhelming the user and harming your SEO.

Using The 3 Pillars to Maximize Rankings on Google

The leak underscores the critical importance of emphasizing high-quality content and enhancing user experience to improve website rankings. By prioritizing factors like user engagement, content freshness, and relevant backlinks - while avoiding spammy tactics - sites can position themselves more effectively in search engine results. This approach not only aligns with Google's evolving algorithms but also ensures sustainable growth and visibility online.

Have questions about Google, SEO or inbound marketing? Send us a message!

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About Vested Marketing

Favicon - ColorAs a certified HubSpot Partner Agency, we not only understand the benefits of using the inbound marketing platform to increase traffic and engagement, improve SEO, generate leads, design effective websites and boost sales, we know how to make it happen.

We are inbound marketing experts, SEO gurus and top-notch website developers.

Our team of Engineers Turned Marketers can help get you noticed - for a more innovative and effective way to reach customers, or provide a more seamless way for companies to find your services. Inbound Marketing has no limit to industry, serving from Crypto & NFT, mining, oil and gas, technology & automation, engineering, technology, construction, healthcare, to industrial & manufacturing.

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