On May 27th, 2024 Rand Fishkin published an article on SparkToro blog detailing an anonymous source who shared thousands of leaked Google API documents with him. The leak included 2,500 pages of API documentation containing 14,014 attributes (API features) that appear to come from Google’s internal “Content API Warehouse.”
The anonymous source revealed his identity which was confirmed to be Erfan Azimi, an SEO practitioner and the founder of EA Eagle Digital.
I am not going to do an in depth analysis of Google API leak, this has already been done by Rand and Mike King. What I am going to share today are the changes I am planning to make in our team’s approach to SEO.
Optimizing for Page Title Mismatch
Optimizing for Page title mismatch is surprisingly a VERY important factor in ranking based on the Google API leak.
We are going to double down on optimizing for title mismatch and go after all the SERPs with this issue.
This is something we have considered a weak spot in SERP for years at TopicRanker, here is an example:
Optimizing for clicks from Chrome
It’s been confirmed that Google’s NavBoost is one of the main ranking factors in search results.
Navboost is a system which currently examines clicks, intent and engagement in Chrome browser. We know that Google tracks clicks from the following:
- searches both during and after the main query search
- email newsletters
- personal sharing over email
- LinkedIn and social media
- PPC/ads
On our side we are going to start optimizing showing only part of our blog post on LinkedIn, in newsletter email and nudging our recipients to click to your site.
We are also going to carefully look at our click through rate on Google Search Console from impressions to clicks to optimize.
Here is an example from aTopicRanker customer who is already doing optimizing for clicks:
Link Building ONLY from High Authority Sites
Link building from lower authority sites is not worth while. We used to think a well rounded combination of high authority and low authority is a good idea, but that’s not what the leak data tells us.
Google actually devalues links from websites which don’t have much traffic.
So our team is focusing only on websites which get 10K+ organic traffic to build links.
Outlinking, Images, Videos
Here are just a few other quick best practices to keep in mind which we’re paying attention to as well :
- Outlinking in your posts is not that important, it’s mainly connected to spam score
- More images and videos help overall ranking
- PR Mentions of your brand – focusing on getting more mentions of TopicRanker brand even if it’s not linked
SEO Office Hours June 7th
On Friday June 7th, 2024 at 10:30am EST we are dedicating our monthly TopicRanker SEO Office Hours to discuss this Google API Leak and the changes marketers should make in their approach to SEO.
Make sure to register for the event!
Register here (even if you can’t make it to watch the recording)
We’ll see you at Office Hours!
Dmitry is the founder of TopicRanker – a software tool to find problems & weaknesses on Google search results and discover keywords you can easily rank for with your website. Over the last 10 years, Dmitry has helped 300+ brands rank #1 on Google through PR and SEO. Dmitry used PR & SEO to grow a startup from 0 to 40 million views per month, and got acquired by Google in 2014. He translated his know-how into JustReachOut.io, a SaaS tool to get covered in press and build authority backlinks without PR firms; it’s been used by 5000+ content marketers to date and was acquired in 2020.