The Google Leak: Sandboxin' Son of a | Ep 50 | Trades Secrets: Contractor Marketing Podcast

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Transcript: 

Devon Hayes:

Welcome back to another episode of Trades Secrets: Contractor Marketing podcast, the contractor marketing Podcast where we talk about all things contractor marketing-

Amanda Joyce:

Contractor marketing.

Devon Hayes:

Okay, I am so giddy today. We are talking about something massive in our industry that kind of shakes things up and turns everything upside down sort of.

Amanda Joyce:

In some ways, yeah. And in some ways it just tells us what we already knew. We’ve been a little slow to release something on this, been out for about a month now. We’re talking about the Google leak. You can call it a lot of things, but we have been a little slow to immediately release something because there’s 14,000 documents in here. There’s a lot for people to go over.

And Devon and I haven’t read them personally, but we’re allowing some of the smartest minds in our industry to really work through these and help summarize all of it so that when we start talking about it, we’re not just taking guesses and people have just peeked into it. We’ve had a whole month for people to really look at this.

Devon Hayes:

And there’s been some interesting breakouts. So of those 14,000 APIs, and that speaks to everything from YouTube videos to Google Maps, but 8,000 of those leaked APIs specifically pertain to Google search as we know it. So with that, today’s topic is going to be diving into some takeaways for you guys for contractors, things that you can talk to your agency about, or things that now that you know, can maybe do yourself if you’re doing some of your own website management and things that some best practices. Some of it is intuitive, you probably already knew, and some of it will be great new information.

Amanda Joyce:

Without much further ado here, let’s dive in.

Devon Hayes:

Let’s dive in.

Welcome to Trade Secrets, where we demystify digital marketing to help contractors get the most bang for their marketing bucks.

Amanda Joyce:

This is for you if you’re a contractor looking for actionable marketing insights.

Devon Hayes:

Learn from home services industry experts to elevate your business through simplified marketing strategies.

Amanda Joyce:

Let’s dive into today’s trade secret.

Devon Hayes:

All right.

Amanda Joyce:

Okay. I do think we should say real quickly, anyone who’s listening that isn’t familiar with this, it has been all over the news, but perhaps it didn’t make it into your feed. These documents were leaked by an ex-Google employee on May 5th, 2024. So it’s all real fresh and we know that even Google has come out and admitted that these documents are in fact true. They were never meant to see the light of day. So there’s a ton of information in here for us to really learn from and lean on it to allow us to create our strategies and just even just let us know that we’re doing things the way we always knew that we should be.

Devon Hayes:

Well, they finally said something. That’s what was so funny is they were leaked and then the big bed, Google beast, frickin crickets. They had nothing to say about it until they finally said, “Well, you shouldn’t assume everything is accurate.” What?

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. They said, “You shouldn’t assume everything’s accurate.” But then they were also like, “You need to make sure that it’s current,” and basically it made no sense. It was very fluffy.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah. They’re like, “Well, you got to make sure it’s accurate,” even though half the documents go directly against statements they’ve made where they did in fact blatantly lie about ranking factors.

So, all right, so what was in these documents? What was in these APIs? What did we learn? And some of the stuff you guys, it’s things you already knew or things if you’re working with an SEO agency or website developer, they already knew. Even as customers, we assume that when we’re using Chrome, you’re following us, you’re collecting data. I think we all assume that, because there used to be Google that lived inside of Firefox or Internet Explorer, and then one day they’re like, “It’s actually not enough. We need to get our own browser because we actually need to incorporate that data into our products, and then how that affects users and what we serve to you.” And it’s all about, at the end of the day, how do we get more advertisers and line our pockets? I mean the user experience. That’s truly what Google cares about, anyways.

Amanda Joyce:

It’s not data mining at all.

Devon Hayes:

No. So I think we knew that. DuckDuckGowas an alternate search engine that was introduced a couple years ago that takes your privacy extremely seriously. So it’s like, yeah, the API tells us that Chrome was collecting our click-stream data is what it’s called.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah, it’s kind of the price of doing business. We all know it, and we’re all even aware when we see ads following us around online. Sometimes I don’t even care. I’m like, “Great, that was in my shopping cart and I forgot to buy it. Thanks for the reminder Google.” So it’s not all bad and it’s stuff that we all see in our daily life, but it’s interesting to see it in black and white from Google when they’ve always done that, kind of just skating around the answer. And they’re always also able to point to the fact that they just want to make sure no one can game the system. At the end of the day, their product is search. So they need to make sure that everybody doesn’t just have the blueprint and they can’t just cheat at it.

But also, we as SEOs and you as business owners spend so much time and money trying to play by their rules. It’s just nice maybe to have a little bit of insight into what we’re doing, maybe where we’re missing, just to know what’s happening behind the curtain a little bit.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, I mean SEOs, it’s like you can follow best practices. But the best SEOs are out there testing theories, testing data, and really monitoring the results when these tweaks and changes are made. You can’t do a whole bunch at one time, because you want to see which one has the most impact on positioning. So that is how the best SEOs kind of discover their little secret cookbook for different customer types and different markets.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah, exactly. And it’s one of the benefits of going with a niche agency in your industry because it’s not all apples to apples. One of the things that was interesting when you and I were going through, we were poring over videos, guides, and articles before we started recording this, just kind nerding out on it and talking about things, and then some of the stuff that we were cracking up that we’re like, “Yeah, that might be the case for some huge e-commerce site, but we know good and well from our own data sets that doesn’t necessarily,” some of the things that are in these documents don’t necessarily apply to some of our exterior contractors, or our plumbers, or our landscapers. So to your point, SEOs need to be continuously testing. And just because it’s in this document, doesn’t mean it’s the bible and we all have to just stick to it.

Devon Hayes:

All right, so we are going to dive in and talk about, let’s see here. I think we’ve got 10 factors that we want to try and cover. And so the first one is Navboost. This was something that was mentioned over 84 times in this… Or not over, it was mentioned 84 times in this leak, and it seems pretty critical to positioning.

What’s interesting is that it takes up to 13 months of a user’s past click behavior, and factors that into those navigational query rankings. And navigational queries are if you’re looking for something specific like a roofing tractor or sighting installation, very specific navigational queries. That’s where Navboost is used for what is served up in the search results.

We knew this. Again, this is one of those we knew, but it wasn’t confirmed. We know that each user is served different SERPs based on obviously location. But your frequency, where you go, the types of websites you like, all of that is part of this Navboost algorithm, and I guess the search rankings that you’re shown specifically.

But what’s interesting here is that within this leak, is knowing that it’s 13 months of your click data that’s used to factor in what ranks on Google for you specifically for these navigational queries. So anyway, that was a good one.

And then that ties into number two, where we talk about clickstream data, which is a broader picture. And you and I were talking about this off base. We were just talking about this with clients last week about how this impacts your overall marketing strategy, not just SEO. You want to talk about that?

Amanda Joyce:

Exactly. And it should impact anyway. So clickstream is really looking at people’s click path through your site, their behavior. So looking at how they’re engaging with your site, and that’s impacting your ranking. So if people are coming to your site, they’re really engaging with your content, they’re going three pages in, they’re reading a blog post, they’re taking action, they’re interacting with a calculator. That is showing Google that your page is engaging and sticky and they’re more likely, it’s going to improve your search ratings.

So that’s something that we’re always working towards with our clients anyway because that’s the whole reason we want people there anyway. It’s just interesting to see that Google’s grading us on that too, that it’s not just us trying to get people to stay on our website, Google cares too.

Devon Hayes:

Well you were saying on page, but it’s impacted. The clickstream is like everything that you do on Chrome is logged within the clickstream. So not how you got to a website is important. Did you come from an email newsletter? Did you come from a social media post? So we knew that social signals are part of a broader SEO strategy. We know that engagement on social media is a good thing. But what we weren’t totally confirmed on is if links from social media channels through to your website had as much impact on say just having a blog live on Facebook itself, and having that clicked on and looked at. I mean I guess that’s the same thing.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. But it’s just so interesting because it is something that we’re constantly working on, but it’s kind of a nice reminder to us of that whole ecosystem and why it matters. And it was interesting, Rand Fishkin, when he was kind of going through all this stuff, one of the videos we watched, he was talking about how they’d moved towards writing newsletters that just kept you in the newsletter environment, gave you all the information you’d need, so you don’t have to take action. You can digest all of his information and move on. And he’s like, “This is reminding us that we need to link back to the website and send people to the website to give those signals to Google.”

So it really has been a best practice for a long time for us, but it’s good to know that there’s a greater good to it. It’s not just let’s try to get a couple leads out of your newsletter. Google cares about that and Google’s rewarding us for those efforts.

Devon Hayes:

So coming from social newsletters, even a link from your email signature, all of those things, all of that is part of that clickstream sphere that leads them to your site. And so it does make sense with what we were doing. You’re backlink building on these pages, but we did. I guess that leads into the next point. This is a great spot for another lesson learned, which again, we already knew, but toxic backlinks.

So we knew old timey SEO, 2000 SEO was like you have to have 10,000 backlinks. And even now, it kills me that there’s all these spammy forum fills that are like, “I’ll get you 5,000 backlinks for 20 bucks,” whatever that is. But some people left that because it’s just this high quantity of backlinks, and the leak did say toxic backlinks do affect your ranking, which we knew, but they can-

Amanda Joyce:

It was nice to see it straight from there. It was even like we had a new client recently that came in and we had to clean up a bunch of backlinks. And I remember the day you were doing it that we were like, “Oh God, we know these are bad, but here we go, we’re about to delete a lot of backlinks. The number’s going to go down dramatically. Is this going to hurt us?” And it didn’t. But to see that from Google now… And obviously we have our own data set we just did. That was the largest one we’d ever had to do. So it’s good to know next time someone comes on board, we’re not going to be at all afraid to just hit that button and delete those backlinks.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, disavow those backlinks. Get rid of them. So then tied into the toxic backlinks, this leads very nicely into number four, which is the anchor text spam. So a lot of times if you bought a backlink or say it was, I don’t, even if it was a free backlink or something. But what we saw with this one client who had thousands of really toxic backlinks, when we would click through to some of those sites, one of them in particular was a dating website. And within the text of this weird dating article, it was like citing installation Atlanta, or something like that, a clear… Anyway, so that anchor text was used on all these backlinks, all these spammy backlinks everywhere. So that’s what a spammy anchor, like an anchor text spam is, is just using that certain phrase linked on another site that then points to your website. You can get dinged for that, which we had made that assumption off our own data set.

But again, it’s one of those things that gets confirmed, because a lot of times, I think you guys, specifically contractors just get hammered with guest posts blogs, which turns out those are not helpful to you. It’s got to be a high domain authority website that’s pointing to you.

Amanda Joyce:

With a ton of traffic.

Devon Hayes:

With a ton of traffic to their site, because it could actually hurt you. Not only does it not help you, but it hurts you. That stuff we knew, but it’s nice to have it confirmed.

Amanda Joyce:

100%

Devon Hayes:

Yeah.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. And then this feeds into the next one really well too, the [inaudible 00:14:54] score, which is really interesting that there’s mention of it in there. It’s very vague, so it required some digging, and there’s a lot of people out in the SEO community kind of guessing at what it means. But we went to Gemini herself and she gave us a little bit of direction here.

But the [inaudible 00:15:12] score is another one where we always, it’s looking at how your brand is aligned with other high authority brands in your industry. So if it’s your top manufacturer, James Hardy, Gaff, whatever it may be, mentions of your brand out there on the web. And they don’t have to be text links, which is interesting because we’re always so worried about getting those backlinks. We’re not going to tell you to stop getting them if you’re sponsoring a local team or something like that and you can get it. But if it’s not linked, those mentions online can very much have a positive impact on your search rankings, which is really great to have affirmation on.

Devon Hayes:

It seems like there’s a little bit of a gray area here, because we see what they’re saying. But we know in practice… For example, I love that you mentioned the local links to a local sports team or some other nonprofit. Even though we know those sites are not getting a ton of traffic, they do have a massive relevance geographically. And we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it with our own clients where we implement this kind of strategy. It does have an impact though.

So even though those sites have low traffic and probably maybe not the highest domain authority… Some of them do. If you can get a .edu backlink, honey get it. But that geo relevance, it is a thing. So we have to, I guess tow the line here when a toxic backlink is something that has nothing to do with the service you offer. It has nothing to do with the areas that you serve or want to serve. And it could have a really, really poor DA domain authority, or it could have a really, really high domain authority like these porn sites that have a domain authority of 85. And that’s where, our poor client had thousands of these types of links. So that’s why that’s kind of top of mind there. But those are toxic.

But the small businesses in your area, the nonprofits that you’re supporting that you sponsor something, they throw a logo up on their site, please don’t mistake those for being toxic. But when you get those form fills that are like, “I want a guest blogging feature.”

Amanda Joyce:

Not worth the squeeze. Not worth the squeeze. But with those, the entity mentions, it was just interesting to find out that we were all so link focused for so long, and that Google’s smart enough now to even suss that out. If your name is listed on a legit local website and there isn’t an actual text link there or anchor link, it can still have a really positive impact on your local search engines. I’ll get that link anyway.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, go get that one.

Amanda Joyce:

And another huge one was page titles.

Devon Hayes:

This one. All right, if we put you to sleep, wake up. This one is freaking crazy. You can check it yourself. You can do this one. So every single page on your website has a title. That title has site-wide ranking implications. Not page-specific ranking implications, but every single title on your website has a ranking implication with Google. That is massive.

So that means if you have pages that are in the sandbox, they weren’t meant to see the light of day, or something that’s meant to be no-index, landing page for home show, something like that. And that’s part of what’s being indexed by Google. All of that has a role to play in your entire website’s ranking, not just that page’s ranking and positioning on Google. Mind blown.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah, mind-blowing. So huge takeaway here. Clean up those page titles. Make sure they’re relevant. Make sure that they are really well-thought-out. And the kind of underlying thing that everyone’s kind in chattering about is that wall page titles are so important. But oh my gosh, of all the classic SEO just checkmark things that we’ve always talked about, that was the only thing that was consistently listed through these documents. All the other stuff that we’ve known they were sleeping on it a little bit more, but page title’s where it’s at. So if you’re only focusing on one thing on your own page, I mean that might be an overstatement. But if you only have a little bit of time, page titles is a great place to start.

Devon Hayes:

And then what’s crazy with this too, so now you’re all going to go in, and you’re going to update your page titles, and you’re going to make sure that they definitely name the service that you provide and where you provide it. And you’re going to make sure it has a great keyword phrase match. Even though some people say that’s old-timey SEO to have an exact keyword phrase match, whatever. User intent, the algorithm is smart enough now to understand user intent and what’s implied in implied meeting. So we don’t have to have an exact phrase match with keywords, but whatever. Have a fully optimized title, but here is another leak that is mind-blowing.

So not only do page titles matter, got that. Page titles, site-wide implications for ranking on everything. Got it. But get this one, the past 20 revisions on your site, 20, the past 20 revisions from your have a ranking factor. There are ranking implications. What?

Amanda Joyce:

What? Yeah. Yeah. Like your past follows you people.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, the blockchain is real. The blockchain is real. Yes. So this is freaking crazy. So what does that tell us? What does that tell us you should do? That you should consistently be updating the cornerstone pillar content on your website. And we do this.

Amanda Joyce:

Always be improving. Yeah.

Devon Hayes:

Like ABI, ABI. And I think we do a really good job of this with our clients. I think we’re consistently like, “You know what? We need more FAQs. We need to add”-

Amanda Joyce:

A gallery or whatever, yeah.

Devon Hayes:

We need to add, most recently, well now rolling onto the next one. But new images, video, reviewing anchor texts, all of those things. But your primary service pages, you should be making improvements I would say consistently. I don’t know, at least touching one service page once a week I would say. And improving it would be fair. And just keep that in mind. The past 20 revisions of your site have a role in your ranking on Google, crazy.

Which ties into, I think we mentioned sandboxing, and Google this. And the leak confirmed they do sandbox new websites. Now we’ve always known this with our own data sets. Once you launch a new website, you go see a dip. You’ll see a dip in organic traffic.

Amanda Joyce:

Exactly. We always called it a dip. We didn’t call it a sandbox. We didn’t know it was that extreme. We knew it was like Google was going to be like, “What do I do with you for a second?” But the fact that they even use the terminology sandbox in those documents is like wow, it really is like you get put on a little shelf for a minute. We don’t know for how long. We don’t think it’s that long. A lot of these other ranking factors probably determine how quickly they forgive you. But you’re straight in the sandbox.

Devon Hayes:

You sandbox and instead of a-

Amanda Joyce:

Son of a bitch.

Devon Hayes:

Sone of a [inaudible 00:23:01] sandbox son of a bitch. So this is crazy. So what we’ve seen traditionally is 30 days. I mean, we’ve seen 30 days where we see a site take, organic traffic is up here, and then we see a massive dip, and then it recovers in month two. I think across all of our sites, that’s exactly what we’ve seen and it’s been 30 days.

And some of them have newer domains. Some of them had 16-year-old domains, super high domain authority, which they do talk about that in the leak too. But we don’t need to get that far into… I would love to nerd out on this. Anyone want to nerd out on this call me. But we have seen everything across the board from a domain rating of zero to a domain rating, a DA or DR of up to, I think the highest one of our clients has had is a 40.

And same thing, they all still see the dip. Some of them have an age domain, some of them do not. So I really think it’s safe to say what we see is about 30 days. It’s not 12 months, it’s a good 30 days. And then we see nothing but that upward trend and that uptick in organic traffic, the uptick in organic keywords that you’re ranking for.

This leads into another excellent point that was leaked about ranking though. So say you do launch a new site and you do expect to see that dip because their sandbox and sons of… Anyway. So you see that dip. What we do know now though is like get you some paid media spend. PPC, baby PPC. They never admitted it fully, but data sets implied-

Amanda Joyce:

Tell us that. Exactly. And one of the things that we were reading all over the place was maybe just straight running search campaigns and not driving a lot of engagement isn’t going to get have a positive impact. But if you’re running a successful campaign and you’re driving people to strong assets where they’re clicking around, they’re engaging, it’s playing into the larger clickstream, they’re bookmarking it and coming back to your ebook later, they’re sharing it with someone, that plays a role in that clickstream we were talking about earlier. So if executed properly, PPC can truly add to your online visibility.

Devon Hayes:

We knew that though. We knew it. It’s confirmed. I mean we knew, Google is a narcissist, we’ve said that 1,000 times. Google likes Google. You want to give me a little money, I’ll give you a little organic love. Maybe a halo effect, maybe some implied trust. Maybe that also lends itself to the clickstream thing we talked about before, kind of that ecosystem of clicks that gets people finally through to your website. It’s all related. So again, a lot of it’s implied, but now just it’s confirmed.

Oh my gosh, we got so excited. We added stuff. We really tried to shorten our list because this can be overwhelming. But there’s so many things, that it’s just hard. It is hard to cut ourselves short on this.

Amanda Joyce:

I mean I do have to point out that even at the beginning of this, we told you there were 10 factors and we’re going to be at 12, and we might add a couple more before we’re done. So things are happening live here, but there’s just so much to talk about and it’s also intertwined.

Devon Hayes:

It is, it is. So this next one kind of goes back to what we were talking about with zhuzhing your service pages. And when you’re fixing your… Not fixing, but when you’re reviewing your page titles and reviewing your pillar content, and adding more content to those pages, add video content.

Video content is a ranking factor. And not only video content, but video content on demand. So don’t have your shit autoplay when people get to your site. They do not like that. And apparently, the on-demand, video on-demand is considered a ranking factor.

So get some sort of video, some sort of multimedia. Even images, different images. Like you said, Amanda, a gallery on those service pages of work performed. Customers want to see that.

And we know this from experience, that really helps with conversions. That’s kind of part of CRO, that conversion rate optimization. Cool, organic and SEO, we get you to the site, but that CRO is what gets them to click the button and submit their info. And you can do that with video and images.

So again, we thought of video and images in terms of CRO, but it is really interesting to see that embedded on-page video on demand is in fact a ranking factor. So if you have been delaying making video, let this be your sign to make more videos.

Amanda Joyce:

Time does need to-

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, you can use, there are so many great AI editors.

Amanda Joyce:

Whatever, yeah. You’re already making stuff for your social. Just make a video, just put some music behind it. Make it a little longer. You got a video. You don’t have to pay somebody thousands of dollars to come out. You can do a little voiceover if you’re camera shy. It’s way easier to record something and then just put it over some still images and some B-roll of your beautiful work. Bada boom bada bing, You got a video.

Devon Hayes:

That’s true. I love that. It’s very simple. So yeah, make video your priority if you can. And I also think with this, we haven’t dove into the Google business profile specifics from the leak, the local side of things yet. But I suspect that if video is a ranking factor on page, then go into your Google business profile and upload vertically those 30 second videos about your company.

Now we did learn, so the algorithm, the biggest one that they’re on right now is E-E-A-T and the toxic backlink thing. I think that was from the Penguin update or the Penguin algorithm. So we knew that or it was an update.

But anyway, Google business profile video. Talk about your company, what’s your USP? Just say, “Hey, we’re Elevation Marketing. We’ve been working in the home services industry helping contractors with search engine optimization, paid media, website design and development for over 15 years, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Amanda Joyce and Devon Hayes, we are the owners, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

Whatever it is, 30 seconds and then upload it to your Google business profile. If we know confirmed right now we have… And Amanda and I have approximately 14,000 more documents to review. No, not 14,000. We’ll see what comes out. The next one we’ll do, we’ll probably be focused on what we learned about local and maps.

But if we know that now, I would imagine it would be the smartest thing to get those short videos, and get them in real time from your phone, with your IP, with your most frequented locations from your phone. We learn that it treats your mobile version and your desktop version, even though it’s you logged in and your Chrome, those are viewed separately for your clickstream data. So what you’re served on mobile is different than what you’re served on desktop. And again, we’ve all experienced that. But knowing that for a fact, use your phone. Go to those neighborhoods you want to work in, record your video, and upload it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Look at these nuggets. Do it, do it, do it. Okay, video we got… Okay, number 11. Oh, all right.

Amanda Joyce:

This is one we’ve always kind of known, and we’re really loving that Google’s supporting our hypotheses.

Devon Hayes:

Yes, yes. So something that’s mentioned in the leak is called the site focus score. And what that ranks is the context of the content on your website. So if you are a roofing company, and I don’t know, you post about brunch places or something like that, the context of that content to the context of the rest of your entire site’s content has an impact on how you rank in Google.

So while I understand, we see that oftentimes when you’re trying to establish geo-relevance. But knowing this, now this Google leak has confirmed, “Yo, if this does not make sense compared to the majority, the bulk of the content on your site, this is going to negatively impact your rankings in Google.”

And this is one where it’s hard, because we don’t have our own set of data to match up against this. We’ve just seen it oftentimes when we’re doing an SEO assessment, we’re like, “I see what happened. I know why you’re not ranking, I know what’s happening,” but we don’t have it with our own set of client data.

Amanda Joyce:

But it’s just interesting, because we see that sometimes when we’re spying on competitors or whatever. We’ll see where their strongest blog posts, take the example you gave, is a roofing company that’s just listing all the best brunch places in their particular market. And sure you can rank for that, and Google’s even ranking it. But it seems what we’re finding from these documents is you’re going to be penalized on the visibility you actually want, and who cares if you rank for the top brunch place around the corner from your office if you don’t rank for your core service terms? So maybe spend a little less time trying to game the system and write content that’s going to shoot up to the top of the search rankings locally real quick, and focus a little harder on the content that’s really going to support the overall theme of your website.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, definitely. And I think that one’s intuitive too for most people. I think it really makes sense.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. Most of our clients, if we had the nerve to get on a call with them and say, “Hey, look at all these impressions you got for top brunch spot in your neighborhood.” They’d be like, “Can you take this out of the report? I don’t care.” So most of you probably already freaking know that, but it’s still just a good thing to know that maybe, don’t get distracted by trying to write all this content that’s going to appeal to everyone. You’re not a realtor, you’re not trying to give everybody a recipe. Talk about what it is you’re an expert at. Focus that time on the videos and all the content that’s going to support the overall theme of your site and why you’re such a badass at what you do, and each score. And forget about the other stuff.

Devon Hayes:

And this, we knew this was a ranking factor because they had your money, your life YMYL updates where it was like anything that had to do with your finances or your health. And if you were posting about that but you were like you said a realtor or something like that, then you would be negatively impacted, because you don’t have the authority, which is where E-E-A-T comes in. You don’t have the authority to be posting about that.

So it all ties together, and these are things we all knew, but again, it’s just the confirmation. It’s nice to have it in black and white. But that’s why there’s some chatter in the community where it’s like, “Are you going to change your marketing strategy? Are you going to change things?” And people are like, “Well I’ve always done really good content with really strong backlinks, and I only associate myself with the best brands, manufacturers, etc.” So the kind of stuff that we already advise, the kind of stuff that people already do, it really is just affirming it. But there are some action items here that we’ve kind of previously discussed.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. It just gives us a little bit more like intentional focus. It just gets us back to the basics and makes us realize that sometimes, some of the other stuff that’s kind of popping up that we’re considering, quiet the noise, stay the road, stay the course, keep doing what we know is best.

Devon Hayes:

Maybe last, maybe least. Not least, but last. Performance, website performance,

Amanda Joyce:

Which again, it speaks to what we already knew, and we have already talked about how Google’s big brother-ing us with Chrome. But it was very clear in the documents that Google is looking at your performance inside of Chrome at your web performance, and it’s weighing in on your rankings. So site performance, load time, security, all that stuff. Google gives us site grades, and we already know that this plays in, but it’s just good to see it. It’s a good reminder. It’s a good reminder that at the end of the day, we’ve got to have really fast high quality websites that deliver what the end user is looking for, and Google rewards us accordingly.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, you get rewarded if people like your website. So having a site people like matters because. And this I think goes back to the clickstream and we’re talking about engagement, and dwell times, and interactions. And these are things we knew when last July. Was it almost, it was last July where they sunsetted universal analytics and they forced us to use GA4, Google Analytics 4. They stripped away what we all used to know as bounce rate and they put instead an engagement rate. That was a big, “Hey, smoke signal, we’re broadcasting to you.” Engagement matters, like engagement from your users matters and it is a ranking factor. And they kind of did tell us. I mean they kind of have told us that all along. Bounce rate’s always been a thing, but now they measure it in engagement, and how it’s measured on GA4 is a bit different, but still.

Amanda Joyce:

Yeah. Well and it is interesting too, because you think about it. I’m sure it was a way too, to back a little bit out of the bounce rate thing where it doesn’t always mean that someone’s engaging with your site just because maybe they kept the tab open and your website’s up on their desktop. They want to know you’re looking at it, you’re scrolling it, you’re engaging. It’s not just leaving it sitting there.

Devon Hayes:

And with clickstream, when you’re in Chrome, and you click through, and you look at a site, and then you exit out of it, it’s monitoring, where did you go next? Did you just change your mind and start looking at… Did you go to a competitor of that same person? Did you go back to Google? Where did you go after you left a site? And that has a factor on what you’re then served in Google and it has a factor on that previous site’s ranking and positioning within Google.

Why they wouldn’t want that leaked is because now you can do a bunch of black hat SEO tactics and just really go to town trying to manipulate the clickstream for a competitor. So I can see why they… And that’s the whole why it’s like cloak and dagger smoke and mirror around their entire algorithm. It’s specifically so super smart people don’t go and cheat the system, just like nowadays. I don’t know, we’ve talked about this with some clients, but how we knew click-through rate mattered. CTR. We knew that was part of engagement. It really always has been.

But do you remember talking through with clients, people who would do driving directions to and from job sites, or go to a competitor’s office but then do driving directions to their own office and then stay longer? Well, it only works one time if you’re on a 4G or 5G network. But if you can get a hold of 3G phones, you can do that because it can’t track you as an individual user or your unique user. You look like a unique user instead of the same user multiple times, because it will only track your actions that one time, and then it kind of picks up on… It’s not a unique CTR, it’s not a unique visit anymore, so it doesn’t have the impact that it does the very first time you do that. So they have kept this protected because of how it can be manipulated-

Amanda Joyce:

For exact reasons like what you just said, where they just, they’re like, “Come on, we’re trying to actually monitor behavior so we can deliver a better product. We’re not trying to monitor it so that,” but in the amount of time it would take to get that 3G phone and go do that, you can just do white hat SEO and do good content, but it’s-

Devon Hayes:

Do good content, take great pictures, do video, have great page titles. So I don’t know, there’s so many more notes here, but I feel like we are going to start to get into the weeds if we stay on this.

Amanda Joyce:

I agree. I feel like there could be a part two. I definitely think we need to have one that’s about local and maps. Maybe we’ll dig in a little bit more on a couple of the offshoots of these topics that they get a little more in the weeds, but we’re not asking anybody to get an MBA in this right now. So I think this is a lot to digest. We hope you guys found it interesting. If there’s something we skipped over or you wish we talked about more, let us know. We are more than happy to geek out on all of this and we could talk about it for hours, but we also want it to be relatable to your businesses and be something you guys actually want to consume.

Devon Hayes:

Yeah, and this is early stages. We’re all still just learning what these documents, what’s in it, and what it all means. So we could have an update here, but these are just some preliminary findings that we were so stoked to share with you.

So ask us questions, hit us up. We would love to kind of answer your questions in a part two of this same series, because there’s going to be 8,000 documents on search alone. I mean, this is just the tip of the iceberg. So ask us your questions, and we’ll cover that and break it all down for you in what will be part two of who knows how many. Thanks for listening.

Amanda Joyce:

That was today’s trade secret. Thanks for listening.

Devon Hayes:

Did you find this helpful? We’re just getting started.

Amanda Joyce:

Subscribe and don’t miss our next reveal.

Devon Hayes:

Until next time.