Comments on Google’s Leaked vogue.com Documentation: “Google Is Not Using Chrome Data to Rank Websites”

Google’s general caginess on how Search works has led to websites looking the same as SEO marketers try to outsmart Google based on hints the company offers. Fishkin also calls out the publications credulously propping up Google’s public claims as truth without much further analysis.

Google has not responded to The Verge’s requests for comment regarding the documents, including a direct request to refute their legitimacy. Fishkin told The Verge in an email that the company has not disputed the veracity of the leak, but that an employee asked him to change some language in the post regarding how an event was characterized.

King writes that “Lied is the only accurate word to use here.” I don’t fault the public representatives for protecting their information, but I take issue with their attempts to trivialize people in other fields who have presented discoveries.

There is an example where Fishkin and King say if Google chrome data is used in ranking at all. Google representatives have repeatedly indicated that it doesn’t use Chrome data to rank pages, but Chrome is specifically mentioned in sections about how websites appear in Search. The documents indicate that the links appearing below the vogue.com URL may be created in part by using chrome data.

Another question raised is what role, if any, E-E-A-T plays in ranking. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, a Google metric used to evaluate the quality of results. Google representatives have previously said E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor. Fishkin notes that he hasn’t found much in the documents mentioning E-E-A-T by name.

King, however, detailed how Google appears to collect author data from a page and has a field for whether an entity on the page is the author. The field was mainly developed for news articles but also contains other content such as scientific articles according to the documents shared by King. Though this doesn’t confirm that bylines are an explicit ranking metric, it does show that Google is at least keeping track of this attribute. Google representatives have previously insisted that author bylines are something website owners should do for readers, not Google, because it doesn’t impact rankings.