Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello and welcome to this episode of SEO is not that hard. It's Ed here and today I'm going to talk about what the Google documentation leak doesn't change in the world of SEO. Now, obviously, you know I'm recording this just the day after the original leak and it's probably the biggest. Just the day after the original leak and it's probably the biggest. Yeah, I mean we thought it was big when um the last core update, um rolled through and that was pretty big um, but this has definitely got the seo world a buzz, probably like nothing else ever has um. The closest we might have got before might have been when yandex uh, the russian search engine had a lot of source code leaked, but obviously big in the Russian market, but in most of the rest of the world Yandex isn't really such a big player. Interesting to see how they run their search engine because there will be crossover with Google. But this Google leak was definitely one of the biggest.

But what I think most people need to realize is is to not get overly carried away with things at this point because fundamentally, not a lot necessarily needs to change, at least not in the short term. Obviously the sr industry for many, many years has worked with google being a complete black box and us only having so much information and misinformation. It's been accepted for a long time that Google is sometimes clever with words. The staff that work for Google who liaise with the wider search community are very cagey about some of the things they say and how they word certain things, so they can be interpreted a number of ways without being very definitive. And obviously these leaks give us a peek inside the box a little bit, but only a little bit.

Is there anything in there that instantly says we should change on how to do certain things? At the moment, no, nothing stand out obvious. The moment, no, nothing, nothing stand out obvious, even things where people have raised them as potentials, like, for example the um is. Is it a small website? Um flag attribute um. Just because within those documents there is an attribute that can be set whether a site is a small website, we have no idea whether that is a negative flag to be set or a positive flag to be set. It could well be that actually google says this is a small website, we'll give them a break, or in certain circumstances it might be oh, we don't want small websites for this result, but in other results maybe it's positive to have um be seen as a small website. We just don't know. We just just know that for some reason they're looking at that. So it's an interesting thing to know, but it doesn't really tell us what, if any, changes to make at the moment.

Now, obviously, seo has been built over years and years and years of experience, testing and correlation data and various other things. I've yet to see anything within these documents that really negates any of the classic basic SEO best practices. There's no smoking gun in there that says you shouldn't be doing this or you shouldn't be doing that. If anything, all it does in certain cases is reinforce um, that basic um seo best practice advice, like good titles, like um, having sites on topic, uh, trying to build topical authority, all those kind of things. There's nothing in there that says any of that is nonsense. It it only reinforces it in certain respects. So what does it change in that case? You know, not a lot right now. I wouldn't make any changes to anything you're doing in SEO right now.

Now, that's not to say that new things are not going to come out of this document, so we've been spending a lot of time and are continuing to spend time on looking at it, especially around the areas that are of interest to us, which is around, obviously, question discovery, clustering of keywords. Also, we are very interested in topical authority and we're looking at if we can tease out of it anything around how Google decides how related two documents are to each other, so that we can potentially see if we can look for content gaps that are based on a topical metric, some kind of embedding, maybe something like that. But it's just early days, you know, and we're not certainly not going to come out and profess any new tactic or any new strategy without having tested it first and spent more time on it. So if you are hearing anyone saying you must do this because of this, is what this document, these google leak documents, say. Right now, I think it's too early.

Um, for example, I've seen some people talking about the requirement for fresh links being highlighted in this talk, which is why you should constantly be link building. Now I am skeptical, based on the amount of information that is actually in there that is mentioned once, about how a link might be treated differently if it's a fresh link than if it's an old link. Obviously this is because, really, between the lines, if they're taking chrome click data and then deciding how to bucket a link into a low, medium or high quality tier link based on click data, new links aren't gonna have any click data. So they may treat them as high quality links to start with, but if they then obviously subsequently don't get clicked, then they're going to become low quality very quickly. So you may get a potentially quick boost from those fresh links, but if they don't get clicked over time, then potentially they're going to become low quality and you've just wasted your money for just having done a very quick boost in links.

Now again, I'm just speculating based on how I read it. Someone else has read it completely different. Oh, you must get fresh links, you must get fresh links. But I'm saying at this point, it's just theories. My theory, their theory, they're both just theories. There's no proof in there and there's so much information missing within these documents as to exactly how these things work. We've just, it's like we've taken a sort of a peek behind the curtain and we've seen some data, some data points not even data, just you know attributes that they are looking at, um, but we don't know how they're using them. So you just need to be a lot of caution.

So yeah, in the first instance, right now, I think, for certainly for a good while, you shouldn't change your seo strategy based on anything in these documents. And you know, I would caution that everybody just waits to see, you know, what other people's research discovers from it. These documents are complex. If you don't have a development and strong development background, this is very serious computer science degree level and higher work in there. This is not something that anyone without a development background can truly read and understand. So it's going to take a lot of time to go through.

So my strong advice is just to carry on as you are at the moment. I mean, if you've listened to any advice I've given, there's nothing that I've seen so far, that negates any of the advice that I've ever given based on my experience and based on my knowledge of seo and the industry over the past 20 odd years. So, um, yeah, no immediate changes, don't panic. There's nothing to panic about in there at all, but we'll wait and see what comes out of it. You know we are looking at stuff. We might be able to improve things, tweak things, especially on the tool side where we can do stuff programmatically. But I think in terms of basic SEO best principles and practices, there's not going to be any immediate changes. But just watch this space.

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools that Keywords People use, that you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again, that's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom To get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.